wordpress at oblios-cap

080722 5k 26:46, 6:30 a.m., low 60s, first run in 72 hours; 12 hours sleep; home course; focus on keeping arms in motion so as to minimize/eliminate neck pain (seems to have worked)

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

…as the Aegean sea.

Back from 9 days “vacation” which entailed 11 planes, two ferries, four hotels, two weddings, and the stark contrast between the U.S. of A. and the E.U..  I understand at last, after only 14 hours in Paris, the arrogance of the French, and know it to be justified.  What has L.A. given the world, besides Baywatch, the Hollywood sign, and gansgta rap?

But I’m struggling mightily to only put energy where I want it to grow, and that means keeping a tight, tight, tight reign on criticism and even generic curmudgeonliness.  Only those complaints or dysphemisms which might actually do some good are to be indulged.  The rest are welcome to remain unvoiced.

So don’t expect to hear as much from me as in times past, at least not until I find this new voice I’ve begun to dream of.

It’ll take a while to get the 1000+ pictures sorted, but I should have some stuff up on flickr in by the end of the week.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

I continue to _slowly_ work my way through “Evolution of Cooperation” (EoC) not because it is difficult, but because I can’t help feeling like a fine-toothed comb is required to net the bits that trouble me. I continue to try to answer the question, “So what?” That is, even if one stipulated that my observations were valid, would they be of any consequence?

The first consequence, and arguably the most important, is that by keeping the nomenclature clear and an eye on salient qualitative differences between the iterated, two-player, non-zero-sum game studied in EoC versus the game delineated in Tucker’s hypothetical, we achieve conclusions that are more robust. It’s the same reason for wanting rigor in any scientific or academic endeavor. But it’s time I asked, is there maybe a good reason for calling the class of games of which Axelrod’s and Tucker’s are both members “Prisoners Dilemmas”? I can’t imagine one, but that could be my lack of imagination. To my eye Tucker’s hypothetical deserves the name and would be best identified as a specific example of a class of two-player, non-zero-sum games with two defining criteria:

1. temptation (T), sucker (S), reward (R), and punishment (P) payoffs, ranked such that T > R > P > S
2. R > (T1 + T2 + … + Tn)/n

(Truth be told, I have qualms about even this labeling scheme, as the terms are more emotionally evocative than befits clear thought. But it’s what Axelrod uses.) Certainly Tucker’s hypothetical conforms to these two criteria, and is a member of the class of games so defined, as is the game studied in EoC, but they are not the same game. Put differently, although the two criteria above are what Axelrod claims define a Prisoners Dilemma I find that to be a misnomer, for several reasons (not the least of which is that in Tucker’s game n equals 1, and is known to equal one, which Axelrod points out, yields predictable mutual defection. This would seem to make Axelrod’s work irrelevant to Tucker’s hypothetical.)

The other consequence which strikes me as next in importance is that in equating the game in EoC and Tucker’s game one is invited to overlook the slippery nature of representation and the realties of utils. In Tucker’s game both players are trying to minimize util loss associated with zero to 240 months loss of liberty. In EoC there are no utils, only points. To me this is both non-trivial and insurmountable. Tucker’s game specifically and intentionally invokes human nature and puts humans in a real dilemma. The game in EoC fails to do that. Worse still, the difference between conserving extant utils and increasing one’s store of utils (if we accept that gaining points is a model for util gain) is non-trivial, on a par with setting 1 equal to -1.

To say that Axelrod’s work is irrelevant to Tucker’s game is not to say Axelrod’s work is without value. But that value might be increased by calling it a survey of computer models for handling one class of iterated, two-person, non-zero-sum games (of which the Prisoners’ Dilemma is not truly a member).

Tangentially, consider visiting the version of the game at Bryn Mawr College’s Serendip. It was playing this version in the mid-90s that prompted me to write my own page. If you play to the end, defecting all the way, you will be told your score, and your average, and that “…you were flirting with an Inconceivably Foul Fate the whole time!” (Ah, the “blink” tag.) This is chicanery, pure and simple. The folks programming the game don’t let their intended conclusion stand on its own and instead have to add a secondary, concurrent game, the outcome of which is allegedly predicated on one’s choice of strategy in the overt game. In the end my beef with EoC might be simply that it seems to be the progenitor of that kind of thinking (and intellectual dishonesty). But time to put things in their proper place. I haven’t yet found anything as bad as this in EoC

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Monday 5k 30:47

Worst time since starting this routine. Neck sore as hell, either from bad form yesterday, or from bad form reading heavy casebook two nights ago, or from bad form playing Guild Wars for 6 hours yesterday (got my Mesmer from level 15 to 17!) Anyway, feel like shit, and did the whole run, three strides in, two strides out for breath, and always, always, always focused on pampering the neck pain. To that end, I discovered on the last leg of the run that I am very right footed, which is no surprise as the right thigh is still visibly bigger than the left. So I spent some time emphasizing the left foot striking the ground, especially on transitions from sidewalk to street and street to sidewalk. This felt pretty good. And, of course, any emphasis on how the foot strikes the pavement tends to increase speed.

Neck still hurts enough to contemplate taking pain killers. But doing lots of stretching for it throughout the day.

Lost track of Tuesday’s time, but it was better than Monday.

Wednesday 5k 28:24

Afternoon run, high 80s, breezy, muggy.  But better than not running.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

mod_security seems to not like it when i update a post in wp.  tell me again why I left blosxom?  oh, yeah, so i could offer a comments feed. ’cause i have so many folks making comments that it was, like, *really* important.  grr.

Tags: Uncategorized // 5 Comments »

Sunday 5k 29:17

And I thought yesterday sucked.  Felt like crap, but no injuries, ended feeling good.  Still focusing on two-strides per breath in, and think I’m going to stick with that until we leave for Greece.  Lots of other stuff orients around that, and it seems a good regulator.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Friday 5k 27:53

As if testing my new resolve that anything under 28:00:00 is acceptable, this one pushed right up to the edge. Was 8:20ish on the first mile. Reversed the intervals, with all in breaths at 2 strides, alternating out breaths at one or three strides. I also distracted from the sense of effort for a few blocks by using my hands to model floppy foot and pulling the road. The feet do seem to try to follow the hands, as far as that goes, and it makes a kind of sense to use that part of the motor map which is more nuanced to develop patterns in less nuanced areas.

Saturday 5k 28:28

Not entirely pleased about the time. Focus: two-strides for each in breath. Also, walked a mile before and after. Walking was good, and this is part of the set up to move to 5m daily after we get back from Greece.

Sunday 5k 29:17

And I thought yesterday sucked.  Felt like crap, but no injuries, ended feeling good.  Still focusing on two-strides per breath in, and think I’m going to stick with that until we leave for Greece.  Lots of other stuff orients around that, and it seems a good regulator.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Much better today. Yes, sometimes I stray too far toward the combative in me, but that’s only a matter of course correction. I likewise sometimes stray to far toward the cowardly. But, by and large, I think I strike the difference as well as the next guy, better than many, and the only real sense of lack in this arena comes from my own high standards. I want more and better for myself.

Now, in the context of a place like Cooperation Commons, the conflict comes from a general tendency to sit back, let others start the dialog/dialectic, and then throw in my two bits where I think appropriate. But in this particular venue I have taken on something of a moderator/stimulator role, and my old methods simply aren’t sufficient. I’m doing new things, and thus need to learn new tricks.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

I feel like I learn more that way. Either my erroneous thinking gets exposed, or I am forced to better articulate my points, but either way, most of the time a good on line row makes me feel like I’m learning, better, faster, deeper.

But at what cost?

Lately I’m troubled by my unruliness, my aggressiveness, my need to pick fights on line.  There are reasons for this personality trait, including the insecurity of a college drop out in a correspondence law school, and legitimate pleasure in dialectic as a means of fostering knowledge.  But of late, influenced in no small part by the good examples of some specific others, and in the context of trying to kickstart more involvement at Cooperation Commons, I find myself thinking it’s time to tone down this particular trait.

And replace it with what?

Fights are interesting.  They draw crowds.  Every creative writing course I’ve seen tells us, "No conflict, no story".  So if it’s stimulating conversation, if that’s the goal, then picking fights works.

But with whom, and to what end?  That is, who are the members of the crowd circling around the combatants, and are they actually the people, or the kinds of people, one is trying to reach?  If not, then maybe there needs be a different approach.

Maybe at 43 I should have worked all this out by now, but I haven’t.  As the possibility of professional life draws nearer (I’m slated to take the California Bar Exam in 2009) I find myself increasingly bound to act in a manner that will actually move me toward the kind of life, and professionalism, I want for myself.

That’s not to say that I contemplate for a second the possibility of forever ridding myself of my rambunctious will to scrap.  Nor even that I will free myself of my fuzzier and flakier moments of goofy experimental writing.

Most pointedly, this has all come to a head as I have started reading "Evolution of Cooperation" by Axelrod.  It angers me, and I can’t sanely say why.  But it seems wrong, intellectually unsound and even a touch dishonest.  Question begging, question dodging.  The Prisoners’ Dilemma, which Axelrod purports to study, has some unique qualities, and there are lessons to be learned from those qualities.  But Axelrod dismisses those lessons and qualities.  I can only assume that he starts with an assumption that "cooperation" is an inherent good, and then seeks a means of showing how it can be achieved in less inviting circumstances.  It seems to me as if he travels 359 degrees to reach his point that some circumstances foster cooperation better than others.

About a year ago a professor (at a real law school) with whom I had the privilege to correspond, read a laundry list of my concerns about Axelrod’s handling of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.  He reply was essentially, "So what?"

I fear that the progressive/liberal agenda is damaged by specious reasoning, which I see in Axelrod’s work.  I feel the progressive/liberal agenda is already on the ropes, socio-politically, and that we simply can’t afford the luxury of building our arguments on sand.  And I think that in ignoring the unique qualities of the Prisoners Dilemma, Axelrod has so built.

And I don’t have a single flipping forum where I can hash this out the only way I know how, adversarially.  And I’m wondering if it isn’t about time I learned a new way.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Slowly working through this one. Counting on tags to help me pull it all together later.

Axlerod’s entire work seems premised on a need to refute Hobbe’s notion that a strong central government is needed to effect cooperation. The fact that Hobbe’s was a) speaking in a specific context, b) manifestly wrong as evidenced by simple observation (for every brute there’s an angel, by and by) seems to have escaped Axlerod.

However, one has to give Axlerod full credit for fighting the good fight, and that is probably the aspect of his work that draws so many people…and so little critical thought. We all want to avoid nuclear holocaust. We all want our nation to be wealthy while at the same time feeling our nation is “good” and “strong” and “honorable” and “plays fair”. But in the context of cooperation and competition between nations, Axlerod says, on the same page, that nations would be best served by free trade and that their best interests lie in protective tariffs. Now, neither of these positions is unarguable, but it is odd for one person to claim both in effectively the same breath.

A good example of the fundamental problem of cooperation is the case where two industrial nations have erected trade barriers to each other’s exports. Because of the mutual advantages of free trade, both countries would be better off if these barriers were eliminated. But if either country were to unilaterally eliminate its barriers, it would find itself facing terms of trade that hurt its own economy. In fact, whatever one country does, the other country is better off retaining its own trade barriers.(emphasis added)

I begin to think there is a personality type drawn to paradox. I am not of that type. When someone proffers me a paradox I begin searching for the falsifiable premises on which it is based, to probe for the mis-perceptions from which it rises. The solution to the paradox of the Spanish Barber is to go and look and see what he does.

Axlerod would seem to be of the first type.

—

Worse, however, than the above proclivity to get lost in paradox, is the hash Axlerod makes of The Prisoners’ Dilemma. He does, in a footnote, credit Flood and Drescher, the originators of the dilemma, and credits Tucker for formalizing and popularizing it. But Axlerod never gets around to actually describing the dilemma. Instead he substitutes in an entirely unrelated generic two-person, non-zero-sum game with a sucker’s payoff, and he labels the moves “cooperate” and “defect”.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, in the actual Prisoners’ Dilemma there are no such options. The game moves are confess or not-confess. There can be no cooperation, because there can be no communication and no coordination. There is one simple choice to make, after which one of two indeterminate results will obtain. There isn’t even the type of communication which “evolves” in Axlerod’s “Iterated Prisoners Dilemma” tournament, for there is only the one round to be played. Axlerod’s lack of sensitivity to such qualitative issues which separate the Prisoners’ Dilemma from generic, iterated two-person, non-zero-sum games is unfortunate, not in the least that it seems to have spawned a generation of cooperation studies and students who do not in fact have their eye on the ball. It is trivial to construct a game in which the payoffs clearly yield predictable behavior. The point of the Prisoners Dilemma is that some games aren’t so predictable. And analysis of the Prisoners Dilemma teaches us that we must distinguish between determinate and indeterminate results. Axlerod’s work, at least as far as page 8 (admittedly not far, but starting premises and principles often make or break an argument) simply fails to make his point. This is best established by the simple reversal of the completely arbitrary labels he has assigned the actions on his generic, non-zero-sum, two-person game: One could swap the words “defect” and “cooperate” and the nature of the choices, as determined by the payoffs, would remain the same.

That’s not well articulated. But the point is better made at my old online version of the game, here.

Tags: Uncategorized, cooperation, prisdem // Add Comment »