The Art Of Subterfuge - How Game Theory Can Help You To Say One Thing And Mean Another

Coming clean and and making a clean breast of things. Forthrightness if not complete honesty.  Truth in labeling, merging backstory and front page.  Honest, transparency, and good faith. But why?Subterfuge when handled artfully, can achieve the same goals with less trouble.  Artifice, often subject of critical reviews, should always be top billing. Game theory is the intellectual's trickery, a calculated way of bridging truth and deception for desired ends.

According to game theory, the player who discloses his strategy last is always at an advantage.  The longer one can keep one’s cards close to the vest, the greater the chances that opponents will guess wrong. The longer one delays making a decision, the more likelihood of acquiring new information that leads to better decisions and better outcomes.



Cindy Loucks was brought up in a family which applied game theory to social interactions.  When invited to a dinner, for example, the Loucks would put off responding until all other better options had been exhausted.  If nothing better turned up by the pull-by date of the RSVP, they accepted.  In this way, the Loucks concluded, they would always come out on top.  Why settle for a dinner at the Lairds when an invitation from the much more attractive Bennetts might be in the mail?



Strategies, whether at the poker table or in society have consequences.  Friends of the Loucks at first began to wonder why they took so long to RSVP, then suspected the better offer scenario, and then realized that they were movable and fungible pieces in their social game.  Especially in a small town like New Brighton, it was not hard to learn where the Loucks had been for dinner.  If they were successful in securing an invitation from the Porters, for example, one of the premier families of the West End, everyone in their milieu knew about it.

The inevitable question was how could the Loucks be so unaware that the town was on to them?  In time the invitations stopped coming because everyone assumed that they had been the Loucks’ last choice.  Even if they had been the Loucks’ first choice, they had to assume that they were their last.
Cindy and her brother Rob went off to college and applied the family’s game theory there.  The schools were big enough to absorb the Loucks children’s blow-offs for three years; but by senior year they ended up like their parents – alone and eating pot roast.



It is remarkable that children end up so much like their parents.  A lot has been made of the importance of cohorts – classmates and random but influential older friends – but there is no denying the powerful chemistry of genes, the hothouse environment of family, and the dependence of children on their parents for so many years.  Cindy and Rob Loucks couldn’t have become transparent if their lives depended on it.  Every invitation and offer was automatically put up on the refrigerator and moved up or down in order of changing priority and importance. 



Cindy had perfected what her uncle called ‘dilatory gaming’. Whenever he invited her to dinner, she would reply immediately, but would call in the middle of the afternoon when he and his wife were at work. She always left the same message. “Hi, Uncle James.  Great to hear from you.  We miss you and love you, and thanks so much for the invitation. I’ll get back to you.” Which of course she never did; but in her view she had discharged her family obligation; but in so doing sent the obvious and unmistakable signal that his name had been moved down the refrigerator list.

Perhaps one shouldn't pick on Cindy so much.  Transparency might not have been her long suit, but it wasn’t for a lot of other people as well.  Looked at objectively game theory makes a lot of sense under certain well defined circumstances – for example, when the probabilistic universe is greater than that of New Brighton. Why should a politician say yes to the first invitation he receives? In fact, an acquaintance who worked on the last Connecticut race for Congressional District 3, said that his candidate’s computer calendar was a much larger and more complex electronic version of the Loucks’ crude refrigerator system. 

Invitations came into the candidate from every group in the district who wanted a favor or to curry favor; and he couldn’t possibly accept all of them.  He, like the Loucks felt they had to keep up a semblance of civility.  The Loucks wanted to be invited back for dinner at the Porters, and the politician did not want to offend potential voters.  His universe was large enough so that he could alienate some groups through ‘political indifference’ while keeping his electoral base solid.  So his ‘refrigerator’ had another dimension.  Not only were invitations ranked in a sliding order of importance, inviters were ranked on a ‘Dismiss’ scale.  The League of Connecticut Women Democrats did not have to be answered because they always voted Democratic.  The AFL/CIO union affiliate of pipe-fitters not only could not be ignored, they had to be cared for.



Professional athletes and movie stars who operate in a huge probabilistic universe can afford to disregard anyone they choose because there are always admirers and groupies lining up to take their place.  Transparency is not an issue.  Ja-Damien Peters was so popular in Kansas City that he could cherry-pick friends, associates, and lovers who didn’t care whether or not he liked or loved them.  To him they were simply empty, used boxes which he didn’t bother to recycle.

Lack of transparency – or perhaps an increase in expediency – while rational when played as part of economic game theory, is corrosive in most other venues. The more people game others, the more the gamed will mistrust everyone.  World leaders and politicians say one thing and mean another; and academics parse their public utterances as carefully as scholars work at Biblical exegesis.  But Christ spoke in opaque parables to challenge unbelievers into believing.  Putin, the Ayatollahs, and the Loucks had only their own interests at heart.



Cindy Loucks had come to Washington with great expectations. There was the Cosmos Club, the Society of the Cincinnati, and the Women’s Club of Washington whose members were all from the capital's oldest and finest families. Despite its reputation as a transit stop for ambitious politicians, Washington does have its well-heeled patrons of society and the arts.  Cindy had expected to thrive in this rarefied atmosphere which that of New Brighton could only aspire.



Not long afterwards, however, she was foundering and lost. It hadn't taken long for the grandes dames of Washington society to catch on to her chicanery and so they politely let her go.

Cindy had made the mistake of thinking that these old ladies were just like any of the other women she had fooled with her sly demurrals and refrigerator moves; but they were old American, solid, and deeply-rooted patriots of their class.  They were more attuned than most to lack of sincerity and tribute.  They outed Cindy as a fraud within a year.

Anyone who had grown up with Cindy Loucks had been prey to her duplicity for too many years to feel sorry for her.  The surprising thing was that she was not stupid and should have known that people far smarter than she would catch on quickly and leave her on the curb.  This was a serious indictment of her parents for tricking the poor girl into thinking that game theory and lack of transparency was a far more streamlined and successful strategy than it ever was.

Cindy is not alone in her dilemma.  Thousands of people are just like her.  They are attracted to the logic and rationality of game theory; but are too inept to be able to apply it carefully enough to factor in human variables, those tricky little quirks, jealousies, and resentments that can throw off any good plan

Sex Education–Hot And Steamy

Any boy growing up in the Fifties got shortchanged when it came to sex, and Bobby Phelps was no different.  He was warned off of ‘impure thoughts’ by Father Murphy; but of course as soon as he delivered one of this famous sex sermons, all Bobby could think of was Marilyn Monroe and how he would give anything to be in bed with her.



Since Father Murphy was obsessed with sex, he delivered his ‘impure thoughts’ sermons many times a year, every boy in the parish knew that he would ask about them in the confessional.  Everyone  figured it was good to confess them right away so that he wouldn’t ask sticky questions.  They were only venial sins anyway, a few Hail Marys the absolution.

Bobby told me that he had undergone a particularly severe grilling.  “Father did not just ask me if I had any impure thoughts”, Bobby said, “but he gave me suggestions. ‘Did you think of a woman’s breasts?’, he said.  When I said, ‘No, Father. I didn’t, he said, ‘Well then, what about her thighs?’ The more he said, the more impure thoughts I had right there in the confessional and the more I had to confess.  I could have been in there for an hour.”



Most of Bobby's friends were old enough to be aroused by the thought of a woman’s body – even a quick glancing thought was enough – and they spent Saturday afternoons at Jimmy’s Smoke Shop ogling the girlie magazines that Jimmy had in the back.  He wasn’t supposed to let boys back there, but if Bobby gave him a dollar he would.



Bobby and his friends weren’t old enough to know what went where.  Their fathers had never told them anything, so they had to rely on rumor and innuendo.  Johnny Ritzer, a boy ahead of Bobby in sixth grade, had so badly mixed up a woman’s organs that only a circus freak could have performed the sex that he had imagined. 

Bobby's mother had repeatedly said to his father, “Henry, isn’t it about time you had that talk with your son?”; but he could never bring himself to actually do it.  Once he tried, but his allegories and metaphors were too abstruse to have any meaning.  He alluded to reproduction in the animal kingdom, spoke about family values and fatherhood, and said he knew what it was like to be a boy my age; but he never got down to brass tacks, what went where, and how to do it.



By the time Bobby had gotten to Lefferts, a New England boarding school on the Connecticut River, he knew all about mechanical positioning and the basics of pregnancy and reproduction; but it took Mr. McAllen and his beautiful wife to provide the add-ons, the real story about sex.

Mr. McAllen was one of the youngest teachers on campus, not that much older than Bobby.  He had graduated from Yale a few years before, married Mrs. McAllen n a big ceremony in Kingsport, Rhode Island, and had been appointed as the biology teacher at Lefferts. All students knew that once a year he gave his famous sex lecture; but since he liked to keep his classes guessing no one ever knew when it would come.

Mr. McAllen had divided the fifty-minute class into discrete segments: How to Get a Woman Hot; How to Know When She’s Hot; How to Know When She’s Coming; and How to Hold It In Until She Does.

If he had even hinted at any of these topics today, he would be tarred and feathered and run out of town; but somehow back then, the school administrators gave him a pass. No one was sure they would have if they had heard his talk about hard nipples, wet pussy, panting, moaning, and ‘ecstatic release’.



In any case, Mr. McAllen had everyone's attention.  Fifteen open-mouthed adolescent boys being turned on by the biology teacher. He must have known that every one would think of his wife in that way every time we saw her; and that she would be the woman every boy thought of when they masturbated under the covers.

The wives of teachers always sat at the dinner table with her husband and us boys.  Mrs. McAllen always sat demurely next to her husband while he ladled out the soup and carved the roast beef; but she had to have known that all eyes were on her and not the meat.  Bobby said many years later that he was sure that the two of them must have been playing some elaborate, secretive sex game that involved the Third Form.

As explicit as Mr. McAllen was, no one still had visual proof of what he was talking about. That was taken care of by Pete Henny, an upperclassman who was on full scholarship to Yale. In those days ‘bursary boys’ had to repay their debt to Yale by working; so he and others bused tables, helped out at the laundry, and shelved books at the library.  Pete had always been ambitious, and coming from a relatively poor family, he knew the value of money and the importance of enterprise.  By the time he graduated Pete had made small fortune in selling used refrigerators, managing the laundry service for Branford College, and last but not least, showing ‘blue movies’ to underclassmen. And that was when Bobby finally saw with his own eyes what sex was all about.



Bobby worked for many years in the field of reproductive health, focusing on family planning.  Most of the countries in which he worked were far more conservative than America in the Fifties, so foreign advisers had to be very careful about introducing the subject. One Minister of Education provided Bobby and his colleagues with a list of approved guidelines; but there wasn’t a word about sex in any one of them.  There were plenty of demographics, relationships between human and natural resources, and economic formulas of supply and demand linked to labor and capital, but no sex. “That will come in due time”, he said.



Other countries while very circumspect about sex education permitted media campaigns about condom use once the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to spread.  Yet the informational programs were all mechanical, focusing on product, cost, and benefit.  There was little about the psycho-social and emotional factors that determine sexual behavior.

Worst of all, few of the US government contractors were willing to discuss the moral aspect of sex and sexuality within a mortal epidemic. Cultural relativity and ‘respect for diversity’ prohibited frank discussions of moral responsibility.  One of Bobby's colleagues had crafted a message that went something like this: “AIDS: Sex without a condom is morally wrong and irresponsible”.  It never saw the light of day.

It all would have been a lot easier if St. Paul had not been so obsessed with sex and conflated it with sin; but that’s water under the bridge:

I wish that all were as I am…those who marry will have affliction in regard to the flesh, and I would spare you that …he who marries his virgin does well, and he who does not marry her does better…in my opinion she, a widow, is happier if she remains as she is and does not marry again (1 Corinthians 7)

 

Paul had no idea what he was doing when he let loose the sex-and-sin issue which has resulted in no end of stormy relationships, jealousy, and murder.

On the other hand perhaps he did know what he was doing – that there is a moral and spiritual nature to sex; and that moral responsibility should be a guide to our behavior. In other words, sex education is only important if it has a moral dimension.

In any case, Bobby can still remember exactly what Mrs. McAllen looked like.  She might not have been the sexiest woman he ever met but certainly the first.