Game Theory: A Lens and Not a Fix
Been reading Len Fisher’s Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life for the past couple weeks. Author of approachable explanations of science such as How to Dunk a Doughnut, Fisher is also an Ig Nobel prize winner and physicist. His goal as a writer is to make science interesting, relevant, and understandable to a broader audience — not just academics and researchers.
Now, I’m not a mathematician, and I haven’t had much exposure to game theory in the past, but as a writer, I very much appreciated Fisher’s conversational writing style, and the very human focus of exploring how game theory can help us to collaborate, rather than compete. His approach in this layman-friendly introduction to game theory is to take on the conceit of using game theory to understand the different types of interactions and competitions between people on a day-to-day basis. Ultimately, these conversations are made with an eye towards how these individual instances can inform and help us understand competition and collaboration on a larger scale, such as between countries.
One of the things I really like about the book is that Fisher doesn’t dumb down the ideas for his audience, and he doesn’t take shortcuts in the discussion by using esoteric language to leap over ideas. He takes care to explain the terminology each step of the way, often with amusing, self-deprecating anecdotes or documented examples, and the end effect is approachable, readable, and engaging.
Fisher also takes a few pages to address how game theory can often seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: you can see it in anything, anywhere, and it could be used to justify any action. However, the value of game theory is not in predicting actions — it doesn’t even matter whether it can or not. Fisher’s take on game theory is that is is a useful tool for helping us to understand why we do the things we do; and to offer us insight into how we might break bad cycles of competition and create self-sustaining cycles of cooperation.
So you don’t need to be a Nobel-prize winning mathematician to understand this book, and for anyone looking for readable science — for yourself or to share with a bright kid — I definitely recommend picking up a copy. Besides being educational, I found Fisher’s optimistic angle a feel good read as well.