Results for “thomas schelling” 103 found
Thomas C. Schelling on why international terrorism is so rare
From a 1991 essay, “What purposes can “international terrorism” serve?”:
…I want to offer another conjecture on why international terrorism is so rare…whereas individual acts of terrorism may be easily within the capabilities of quite ordinary individuals , a sustained campaign on any scale may require more people and more organization than could be viable in most target countries. And there may be some negative feedback from the low success rate to the low attempt rate: Resourceful individuals, people with brains or people with money, may find terrorism so unpromising that they do not choose to contribute effort or money. And any organization that is secret and dangerous risks both defection and infiltration; a group of people large enough to carry on a sustained campaign, perhaps simultaneously in different target areas, may simply be too vulnerable in defection and infiltration. Even seeking financial help risks being informed on.
That is one of the essays in the book Violence, Terrorism, and Justice, edited by R.G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris. By the way, Schelling cites the campaign of Palestinian radicals against Palestinian moderates as one of the examples of a successful terrorist plan.
We had Nash and Schelling — who did the Soviets have?
The bi-polar confrontation between the Soviet Union and the USA involved many leading game theorists from both sides of the Iron Curtain: Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann, Michael Intriligator, John Nash, Thomas Schelling and Steven Brams from the United States and Nikolay Vorob’ev, Leon A. Petrosyan, Elena B. Yanovskaya and Olga N. Bondareva from the Soviet Union. The formalization of game theory (GT) took place prior to the Cold War but the geopolitical confrontation hastened and shaped its evolution. In our article we outline four similarities and differences between Western GT and Soviet GT: 1) the Iron Curtain resulted in a lagged evolution of GT in the Soviet Union; 2) Soviet GT focused more on operations research and issues of centralized planning; 3) the contemporary Western view on Soviet GT was biased and Soviet contributions, including works on dynamic stability, non-emptiness of the core and many refinements, suggest that Soviet GT was able to catch up to the Western level relatively fast; 4) international conferences, including Vilnius, 1971, fostered interaction between Soviet game theorists and their Western colleagues. In general, we consider the Cold War to be a positive environment for GT in the West and in the Soviet Union.
That is from a new paper by Harald Hagemann, Vadim Kufenko, and Danila Raskov, via Ilya Novak and Beatrice Cherrier. And via Kevin Vallier, here is a new paper on how Schelling’s game-theoretic notion of stability may have come from his very early work on macroeconomics.
Tom Schelling stressed a related point in his climate change talk
Vanishing glaciers raise urgent concerns beyond Tibet and China.
By one estimate, the 46,000 glaciers of the Third Pole region help sustain 1.5 billion people in 10 countries — its waters flowing to places as distant as the tropical Mekong Delta of Vietnam, the hills of eastern Myanmar and the southern plains of Bangladesh. Scattered across nearly two million square miles, these glaciers are receding at an ever-quickening pace, producing a rise in levels of rivers and lakes in the short term and threatening Asia’s water supply in the long run.
That treatment is from Edward Wong at the NYT.
Perhaps you’ve already read Alex’s report on Schelling. It was remarkable that Tom was able to talk for an hour straight, without pausing, without mistakes, grammatical or otherwise, and with a perfectly conceived factual, dramatic, and narrative arc. With excellent stories. All without notes. At the age of 94.
Schelling is owed an apology (Lomborg too)
John Quiggin writes that "The wheels are coming off Bjorn Lomborg’s attempt to undermine the Kyoto Protocol," citing an Economist article for indicating that some members are dissenting and reiterating his claim that the Copenhagen Consensus was rigged against climate change. Methinks it is Quiggin who has prejudged the issue.
In his earlier article Quiggin complained that the panel and the climate change opponents were rigged. In particular he noted:
[T]he members of the Copenhagen panel were generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto. Indeed, Lomborg’s argument that spending to mitigate climate change would be better directed to aid projects was first put forward by Thomas Schelling, one of the Copenhagen panellists.
Now consider what the Economist article has to say. True, it notes, "Now, some members of the Consensus are dissenting." Who you might ask? Why it’s…Thomas Schelling!
Again from the earlier article, Quiggin attacked the opponents of the climate change paper writing:
The same lack of balance was evident in the selection of ‘opponents’. For Robert Cline’s paper on climate change, Lomborg picked vigorous opponents of Kyoto, Robert Mendelsohn and Alan Manne, and the result was an acrimonious debate.
But who does Quiggin have the temerity to cite as another dissenter? Why it’s… Robert Mendelsohn!
Quiggin doesn’t explain why Mendelsohn and Schelling are offering their (mild) dissent – it’s not because they are in favor of spending lots of money on global warming. Rather, it’s because they think that the author of the climate change chapter, William Cline, exagerates the costs of global warming and proposes far too costly solutions.
Thus, believe it or not, the new theory of how Lomborg rigged the climate change study is that he chose someone to write the global climate change chapter who was too strong an proponent of its importance! Give me a break.
Bottom line is that the the so-called dissent reinforces the Copenhagen Consensus which is that modest steps to combat global warming may be justified (Mendelsohn proposes an initial carbon tax of $2 to Cline’s $150) but that there are many other more worthwhile development goals.
Are economists better at games?
"In poker, world champion of poker, Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, has his PhD in Computer Scientist from UCLA and his father teaches game theory there. He and his father have co-authored an article on Borel and von Neumann’s models of poker, and from what I’ve been able to gather, Ferguson’s style of play draws heavily from game theory. He and his father also show why the very best poker players in the world play a very aggressive game (actualy, Borel and Nash showed it, but Ferguson and his dad helped translate it for me) where optimal playing is actually to bluff *a lot* (more than you might think), even though every single book out there that teaches you how to play Texas Holdem recommends a conservative "tight aggressive" strategy. Game theory suggests to raise (in limit poker) with your absolute dead worst hands a lot more than people usually feel comfortable doing – but this is exactly the behavior of the greatest, like Doyle Branson, Gus Hansen, and TJ Coultier. So, I can buy that economics and game theory more generally should make one the better player. But, it’s also interesting to note that the world’s best poker theorists (David Sklansky) is criticized for not being able to pull it off in real play. It’s not enough to actually know the opimal move; it takes a certain level of openness to variance to be truly great at poker. So I suspect it’s a mix of heart and head, and game theory can only take you to the water, but not help you drink."
Wednesday assorted links
1. Lyman Stone criticizes the Pope paper on church attendance. Good criticisms, see also the points by Sure and others in the comment section. This paper doesn’t seem to hold up? I’ll gladly publish a response by the author, otherwise a withdrawal might be in order?
2. Good critique of the AGI concept. And AI regulation is unsafe, by Max T.
3. Ruxandra on the anti-cavities thing.
4. Mass shootings are down considerably.
5. First chat between humans and whales?
6. Open access version of Ran Spiegler’s The Curious Culture of Economic Theory.
7. 14 years ago, Thomas Schelling session on Iran and nuclear weapons. Let’s hope this does not very soon become more relevant.
Saturday assorted links
1. Henry Oliver and GOAT and personality.
2. Various ratings for LLM services.
3. Georgetown fact of the day, 1940 edition. And Unilever retreats from “Woke” (FT).
4. “Preschoolers extend novel labels based on people’s weight rather than their race.“
5. I guess they all read Thomas Schelling?
6. Correct link for new Stephen Dubner podcast series. Theme is how to succeed by failing.
The death of deterrence?
https://twitter.com/RLHeinrichs/status/1715171574167261313
Not to mention Hamas attacking in the first place (you also can debate at whom the Houthis were aiming, probably not the U.S. per se). And the 32 dead and 11 Americans unaccounted for.
Forget about moralizing and sides-taking for a moment, and just try to think this through as a game. Either a) attacks of this nature recur and escalate, or b) the U.S. and/or Israel act to reestablish deterrence? If b), what kind of act would suffice to reestablish some kind of effective deterrence? Again, to think clearly please try to steer your attention away from the moral question of what you think the U.S. and/or Israel should do.
I date the decline (but not death) of deterrence to when Iraq fired 42 Scud missiles into Israel in 1991 and the Israelis did not retaliate. That decision was widely praised at the time, and perhaps correctly. Still, since then people have been solving for the equilibrium…and now that new equilibrium seems to be upon us. What would Thomas Schelling say? This is all worth a very serious ponder.
My Conversation with Noam Chomsky
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about LLMs, whether he’s optimistic about the future, what he thinks of Thomas Schelling, the legacy of the 1960s-era left libertarians, the development trajectories of Nicaragua and Cuba, why he still answers every email, what he’s been most wrong about, and more.
I would stress there is no representative sample from this discussion, so any excerpt will not give you a decent sense of the dialogue as a whole. Read the whole thing, if you dare! Here is one squib, in fact it is the opener, after which we ranged far and wide:
COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?
CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.
His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.
COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?
CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.
It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era. The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.
Humboldt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought, which were always pretty much identified. Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unbounded use of it. Those conceptions weren’t very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the theory of computation by Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and other great mathematicians, 1930s and ’40s. But now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood. In fact, everyone has it in their laptop by now.
COWEN: Was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau astray on politics?
I will say that I am very glad I undertook this endeavor.
My Conversation with Glenn Loury
Moving throughout, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury joined Tyler to discuss the soundtrack of Glenn’s life, Glenn’s early career in theoretical economics, his favorite Thomas Schelling story, the best place to raise a family in the US, the seeming worsening mental health issues among undergraduates, what he learned about himself while writing his memoir, what his right-wing fans most misunderstand about race, the key difference he has with John McWhorter, his evolving relationship with Christianity, the lasting influence of his late wife, his favorite novels and movies, how well he thinks he will face death, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s your favorite Thomas Schelling story?
LOURY: [laughs] This is a story about me as much as it is about Tom Schelling. The year is 1984. I’ve been at Harvard for two years. I’m appointed a professor of economics and of Afro-American studies, and I’m having a crisis of confidence, thinking I’m never going to write another paper worth reading again.
Tom is a friend. He helped to recruit me because he was on the committee that Henry Rosovsky, the famous and powerful dean of the college of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, who hired me — the committee that Rosovsky put together to try to find someone who could fill the position that I was hired into: professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies. They said Afro-American in those years.
Tom was my connection. He’s the guy who called me up when I was sitting at Michigan in Ann Arbor in early ’82, and said, “Do you think you might be interested in a job out here?” He had helped to recruit me.
So, I had this crisis of confidence. “Am I ever going to write another paper? I’m never going to write another paper.” I’m saying this to Tom, and he’s sitting, sober, listening, nodding, and suddenly starts laughing, and he can’t stop, and the laughing becomes uncontrollable. I am completely flummoxed by this. What the hell is he laughing at? What’s so funny? I just told him something I wouldn’t even tell my wife, which is, I was afraid I was a failure, that it was an imposter syndrome situation, that I could never measure up.
Everybody in the faculty meeting at Harvard’s economics department in 1982 was famous. Everybody. I was six years out of graduate school, and I didn’t know if I could fit in. He’s laughing, and I couldn’t get it. After a while, he regains his composure, and he says, “You think you’re the only one? This place is full of neurotics hiding behind their secretaries and their 10-foot oak doors, fearing the dreaded question, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Why don’t you just put your head down and do your work? Believe me, everything will be okay.” That was Tom Schelling.
COWEN: He was great. I still miss him.
And the final question:
COWEN: Very last question. Do you think you will do a good job facing death?
Interesting and revealing throughout.
What I listened to in 2022
I am listing only new releases:
Bach, Johann Sebastian, complete Sonatas and Partitas for violin, Fabio Biondi. Perhaps the only recording I like as much as the older (stereo) Milstein performance?
Bach, Johann Sebastian, The Art of Life, Daniil Trifonov, The Art of the Fugue (favorite of Thomas Schelling!) is the main work here. Schelling, by the way, was especially fond of the Grigory Sokolov recording of this work.
van Baerle Trio, Beethoven complete piano trios
Beethoven, Kreuzer sonata for violin and piano, Clara-Jumi Kang and Sunwook Kim
William Byrd, John Bull, The Visionaries of Piano Music, played by Kit Armstrong
Handel, George Frideric, Eight Great Suites and Overtures, by Francesco Corti on harpischord
Matthias Kirschnereit plays Mozart, the complete piano concerti, and two Rondos
Mozart, La flûte enchantée (yes in French), conducted by Hervé Niquet
Shostakovich/Stevenson, mostly Op.87, piano music, by Igor Levit
Szymanowski, Karol, Piano Works, by Krystian Zimerman
By far my biggest discovery was Benjamin Alard playing the complete keyboard works of Bach, mostly on organ and clavichord. These are some of the best recordings of the best music I have heard, ever.
There is much more, but those were the highlights. I listened to plenty of so-called “popular music” too, but I don’t think anything you would need me to tell you about.
How to discover Indian classical music
Versions of that request were repeated a few times, along with a request for a YouTube or Spotify list. Given the visual element, I would say that YouTube >> Spotify. But mostly you are looking to hear world class performers in live concert, there is no substitute for that, most of all for the percussion, but also for the overall sense of energy.
I first heard Indian classical music by stumbling upon the Ravi Shankar section of the Concert for Bangladesh album, at a young age (thirteen or so?). It seemed obvious to me this was better than “Within You, Without You,” but it was a long time before I really would get back to it. Shankar never ended up clicking with me, but definitely he was the introduction.
As a young teen I also loved the Byrds song “Eight Miles High,” with its opening riff taken from John Coltrane’s “India.” Not exactly Indian classical music, but a clue there was much more to discover, and again I took this very seriously. The raga bits on the Byrds 5D album intrigued me more than the lugubrious Harrison tunes.
I recall my high friend friend (and composer) Eric Lyon insisting to me that Carnatic classic music was better than American jazz improvisation. I didn’t follow him at the time, but I always took Eric’s opinions very seriously, and so I filed this away mentally for later reexamination.
I also recall Thomas Schelling telling me that his son decided to become a professional Indian classical musician (in fact he ended up as more of a poet and translator). I had the vague sense this was something quite admirable to do. So the data points were piling up.
Years passed, and I spent most of my time listening to traditional Western classical music, and with fantastic aesthetic returns.
Still, I grew restless to learn more, and kept on returning to musics I did not understand very well. My best and most common entry point was simply to listen to a lot of other musics that are (were?) somewhat atypical to Western ears, whether it be atonal music, guitar drone music, or Arabic microtonal tunes. Nonetheless progress was slow.
In the 1990s, I started going to lots of world music concerts in the DC area, often at University of Maryland or GWU. These years were a kind of golden age for world music (a terrible term, btw) in the U.S., as post 9/11 visa restrictions were not yet around.
Twice I heard L. Subramaniam play Indian classical violin. Wow! My head was spinning, and from there on out I was determined to hear as many Indian classical concerts as possible. Maybe his melodic lines are not the very deepest, but he was a remarkably exciting performer. A whole new world was opened up to me. I also heard Shakti, with Zakir Hussein and John McLaughlin, play at GWU. That was fusion yes, but it owed more to Indian classical traditions than anything else. To this day it remains one of the three or four best concerts I’ve ever seen.
The Ali Akbar Khan Signature Series CDs made increasing sense to me, and I grew to love them and many others. I did go back to Shankar, but decided he was, all along, far from the top of the heap. Maybe a great marketer, though.
S. Balachandar on the veena was another early discovery, via Fanfare.
Later in the 1990s I read Frederick Turner write that Indian classical music was one of humanity’s greatest spiritual and aesthetic achievements, and around the same time I chatted a bit with Turner too. I had never quite heard anyone claim that before, but instinctively I realized I very much agreed with him. I decided that I believed that too.
Shikha Dalmia helped me out with some recommendations as well, and she was the first one to mention to me the Indian classical music festival in what is now called Chennai. For many years I wanted to go.
Then followed more years of listening. On my first India trips, I carried back a large number of $2 CDs, high variance but many of them excellent, such as Kishori Amonkar. I bought as much as I could plausibly carry back home.
About eight years ago, I took daughter Yana to the Chennai Indian classical music festival held every December. We saw a number of incredible performers, most notably the great U. Srinivas (mandolin!), before his demise. I can recommend this experience to you all, and I plan on going again.
So what is the lesson of all this? My path was so inefficient and roundabout! You can avoid all of that, just read this blog post and be there…voila!
But that doesn’t quite work either.
Data on IR scholars and their views on Russia/Ukraine
MR reader Edmund Levin sent me this very useful piece, based around a poll of IR scholars, with the poll opened on December 16 and if I understand correctly continuing through some point in January 2022.
Here is one question “In the next year, will Russia use military force against Ukrainian military forces or additional parts of the territory of Ukraine where it is not currently operating?” The responses:
Yes 203 56.08%
No 73 20.17%
Do not know 86 23.76%
You will note that the question could simply be referring to some additional police action, which is in fact what many people were predicting at the time. I find it striking that the researchers don’t ask about a full-scale invasion. What percentage would have predicted a full-scale attack?
Here is the same question posed to the regional specialists, namely: “In the next year, will Russia use military force against Ukrainian military forces or additional parts of the territory of Ukraine where it is not currently operating?” The responses are barely different, though slightly better:
Yes 36 (60.0%)
No 12 (20.0%)
Don’t know 12 (20.0%)
I take those results to be 60-40 that a modest majority of the specialists respondents expected further Russian military action in the next year, again noting that additional police action would suffice to generate a “yes” response.
Is that a good or bad performance relative to a full-scale invasion date of February 24, with the massing of Russian troops well underway?
If I turn to the December 3 Washington Post, I see a major article by journalists Shane Harris and Paul Sonne, titled “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns.” The piece offers plenty of detail, including photos, maps, and good sourcing. Of course it turned out to be correct, and I am only one of many people who realized this at the time. Furthermore, if you saw such a piece, you might have inquired with your network at the time (as I did), including sources in multiple relevant countries, and learned in response that the predictions of this article were no joke, no media excess, and in fact likely to happen. Furthermore the rhetoric, demand, and logistics investments of Russia at the time strongly suggested “attack and blame Ukraine” as the equilibrium, rather than some kind of knife-edge bargaining strategy of “attack with p = 0.6” — that one can learn by reading Thomas Schelling.
So in my view the regional IR specialists were well behind the understanding of two Washington Post reporters, or for that matter well-connected newspaper readers. A lot of the experts don’t seem to have tracked the issue very closely. Here is my previous (lengthy) post on the topic.
Addendum: Levin also points out to me that Sam Charap of Rand got it right as early as fall of 2021.
Saturday assorted links
1. Thomas Schelling 1963-64 syllabus and final exam.
3. Transitioning to post-quantum cryptography?
6. “The FDA won’t allow European formulas to be sold here because of inane labeling concerns…”
7. “New funding effort will deploy a corps of scientist ‘scouts’ to spot innovative ideas.”
8. Biden administration seeking to stymie charter schools (NYT). #TheGreatForgetting
The doctrine of nuclear deterrence must evolve
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, about 3x the normal length. Here is one excerpt:
From the vantage point of 2022, it is clear that the norms doctrine, while it served useful functions for decades — just as did the MAD doctrine — has its limitations. The most obvious is that norms tend to weaken and eventually collapse.
Once the use of nuclear weapons became classified as “unthinkable,” political actors tried to extend that designation to other kinds of weapons. In doing so, they weakened the concept of unthinkability. The broader category of “weapons of mass destruction,” for example, was also supposed to be unthinkable. Yet Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein used them against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. This led some countries to support Iran, but Saddam remained in power until former President George W. Bush led the war against Iraq roughly two decades later.
In 2012, former President Barack Obama told Russian President Vladimir Putin that they should agree that chemical weapons should not be deployed in Syria, as that would constitute a “red line.” Syria went ahead and used them, and there was no major kinetic U.S. military response, thereby erasing that red line and possibly others.
The pattern is evident: Once the category of “unthinkable” weapons is created, it is expanded so much that it loses its credibility. Politicians tend to spend down the reputational capital that their predecessors build up.
And:
Another problem with the norms doctrine is that, sooner or later, there is value in breaking a norm — precisely because the norm was successful.
Think back to your high school. Your teachers probably set up behavioral norms that most everyone followed. That left room for a rebel who dared to defy those norms, if only for attention and to signal non-conformity.
With nuclear weapons, it’s not as if Putin or some other political “rebel” would use a bomb to make a point or to seem cool. Rather, Putin has been finding it useful to threaten the West and NATO with possible nuclear weapons use. If enough scary threats are issued, the use of nuclear weapons no longer seems unthinkable. And as the unthinkability norm erodes, eventually someone — Putin or not — may use nukes.
Finally, as mentioned above, the norms doctrine assumed the major nuclear powers all had a stake in a status quo…
Cameo by Thomas Schelling!