
Thomas Schelling has died - nabla9
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/13/thomas-schelling-has-died-his-ideas-shaped-the-cold-war-and-the-world/
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nabla9
The beginning of PART II in his book "The Strategy of Conflict" is good intro
to what he was thinking.

PART II. A REORIENTATION OF GAME THEORY

4\. TOWARD A THEORY OF INTERDEPENDENT DECISION

On the strategy of pure conflict - the zero-sum games - game theory has
yielded important insight and advice. But on the strategy of action where
conflict is mixed with mutual dependence - the nonzero-sum games involved in
wars and threats of war, strikes, negotiations, criminal deterrence, class
war, race war, price war, and blackmail; maneuvering in a bureaucracy or in a
traffic jam; and the coercion of one's own children traditional game theory
has not yielded comparable insight or advice. These are the "games" in which,
though the element of conflict provides the dramatic interest, mutual
dependence is part of the logical structure and demands some kind of
collaboration or mutual accommodation - tacit, if not explicit - even if only
in the avoidance of mutual disaster. These are also games in which, though
secrecy may play a strategic role, there is some essential need for the
signaling of intentions and the meeting of minds. Finally, they are games in
which what one player can do to avert mutual damage affects what another
player will do to avert it, so that it is not always an advantage to possess
initiative, knowledge, or freedom of choice.

~~~
rfrey
Is that typical writing in the book? That is incredibly clear while still
being reasonably dense.

~~~
michaeljwebster
That is very typical of Schelling. Clear, but you need to read it over and
over.

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NelsonMinar
The Schelling model for racial segregation is a great little agent-based model
demonstrating one complex systems idea. There's a nice browser version here:
[http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-
segreg...](http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segregation/)

~~~
Baeocystin
Neat. I think I will show this to my more SJW-ish friends, simply to
demonstrate that there is more than one model that could account for
population self-segregation other than someone being hateful or racist.

~~~
pja
Don’t be a jerk about it though - just because there may be non-racist reasons
for segregation to have occurred doesn’t mean that there weren’t outright
racist reasons too: sundown towns were a thing in the supposedly “enlightened”
north-east for a start & undoing the effects of those racist policies doesn’t
happen overnight.

~~~
SiVal
The existence of segregation is repeatedly cited as PROOF of racist oppression
and anyone who says otherwise denounced as racist. The fact that segregation
can easily emerge even with no oppression at all means that segregation alone
is not sufficient to prove that any injustice has been committed at all much
less that injustice/oppression/racism is the primary cause of the segregation.

~~~
Angostura
Cited as evidence perhaps. I would like to see these repeated assertions of
proof.

~~~
Baeocystin
Have a conversation with left-leaning, progressive college student.

I wouldn't even have ever heard the term SJW, or be aware of how modern
progressivism is so different from the liberal attitudes of my youth, if I
didn't have younger family still in college.

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CurtMonash
I had the privilege of lunching with Tom semi-regularly in the academic years
1979-81. He was remarkably gracious and at least seemingly humble, and just an
all-around nice guy. (Others at our table were Dick Zeckhauser and Chris
DeMuth.)

Tom wasn't exactly my inspiration to "Think deeply about simple things"; I got
that mantra from Arnold Ross. But he was perhaps the best I ever knew at
putting that principle into practice.

One of the great ones has left us.

RIP.

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liamcardenas
For those who are interested, Schelling's work was also foundational to David
Friedman's (son of Milton) work on libertarian anarchist theory.

From the conclusion of
[http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.htm...](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html)

"The central project of this essay has been to give an account of rights,
especially property rights, that is both amoral and alegal—an account that
would explain the sort of behavior we associate with rights even in a world
lacking law, law enforcement, and feelings of moral obligation.[28] I have
tried first to explain how, with no legal system to enforce contracts, it
might still be possible to contract out of a Hobbesian state of nature, and
then to show how the same analysis can be used to understand in what sense a
civil order, such as our own society, is different from a Hobbesian state of
nature. Having offered answers to those questions, I then tried to show how we
might get from the state of nature to something like the present society, and
to use the analysis to partially explain the puzzling similarity between
actual rules, just rules, and efficient rules.

If my analysis is correct, civil order is an elaborate Schelling point,
maintained by the same forces that maintain simpler Schelling points in a
state of nature. Property ownership[29] is alterable by contract because
Schelling points are altered by the making of contracts. Legal rules are in
large part a superstructure erected upon an underlying structure of self-
enforcing rights."

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charion
When I asked my dad -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Des_Ball](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Des_Ball)
\- what the most important books were to shaping his thoughts, The Strategy of
Conflict was number one.

Not a good year for strategists.

~~~
dhimes
Sorry you lost your father. That's really rough- I've been there (years ago).
Find some peace for the holidays- it can get kind of rough if you don't
prepare.

~~~
charion
Thank you. Fortunately I have a close family.

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sandworm101
Schelling's works are necessary reads. They are important, but every time I
look at them I come away thinking of them more as codifications than novel
concepts. He did put names to previously unnamed dynamics (game theory) but
when I read history I cannot believe that people pre-Schelling didn't already
know and work with these concepts daily. I'd say that he did great service in
documenting and understanding the dynamics. His work allows everyone to up
their game. But I read his work more as I would read the work of a
psychiatrist 'discovering' a new disease. The disease has always been there
and now the doc is documenting it in a way so that other docs may recognize
and discuss it more easily.

~~~
jacobwcarlson
And Black-Scholes just codified what seasoned options traders had understood
for centuries. The reason it was important and rewarded is exactly that
codification, which enables rapid understanding to a wider audience.

Discovering something new is exciting and important. Explaining that discovery
in a way usable by the rest of humanity is ground-breaking.

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nickbauman
On global warming Schelling has an interesting take. He claims that GW has
potentially disastrous consequences to developing nations but the danger to
developed nations has been exaggerated. That developed nations, in reducing
emissions, will bear most of the cost while the developing world will get most
of the benefits.

That seems very short sighted in a couple of ways. First the notion that
people suffering from the effects of ecology destruction and the aftermath
that ensues just hang around and suffer and keep the suffering contained.
Secondly the notion that there's nothing to be gained by combating global
warming for the entire world. More people die from the effects of pollution
than the combined deaths from homicide, war, car accidents and suicide per
year.

~~~
pdonis
_> More people die from the effects of pollution than the combined deaths from
homicide, war, car accidents and suicide per year._

Pollution is not the same thing as climate change.

~~~
nickbauman
Imagine a Venn diagram with Pollution one circle and Climate Change in another
and the intersection is Reducing Emissions. The title being "Intersection
affects both".

~~~
pdonis
Yes, I understand that reducing pollution by, for example, reducing emissions
from coal-fired power plants will also affect climate change (assuming you
believe reducing CO2 emissions will do that). That doesn't change the fact
that pollution causing people to get sick or die is not the same as climate
change causing people to get sick or die. If we want to fight pollution
because it kills people, and help with climate change as a side effect, that's
one thing; but the post I responded to was basically arguing that we should
fight climate change and hope that it reduces pollution as a side effect,
based on the fact that pollution kills people. That argument makes no sense.

~~~
nickbauman
Orly? _No_ sense? The more issues that can be shown to affect people directly
that can be traced back to emissions the better.

~~~
pdonis
_> The more issues that can be shown to affect people directly that can be
traced back to emissions the better._

I would have thought that "pollution kills people" was already reason enough.

Or, to look at it from the other side, if a country like China isn't going to
reduce its emissions in order to stop killing people right now, why would they
bother to do it to reduce some hypothetical effect on climate change over the
next century? And if the answer is "well, they say they will", why would we
believe them?

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kriro
R.I.P.

Reminds me of the Coursera course on model thinking:
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-
thinking](https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking)

The segregation model was one of the models (which I though eas pretty neat),
the course is basically an introduction to a bunch of different models to
think about the world. Highly recommended.

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mkesper
Original title is better: Thomas Schelling has died. His ideas shaped the Cold
War and the world.

~~~
davidmr
Usually I can see why titles are edited. This one makes no sense to me. After
reading the article I can certainly see why he was important, but a household
name he ain't.

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SeanDav
I wonder if the theory "Nash equilibrium" was influenced by him, or even
possibly vice-versa.

~~~
CurtMonash
Without looking it up, I don't think the timing was right. He once said his
work during WW2 was one of the highlights o his life, but while I forget the
details, I think it was conventional economies rather than the strategy stuff
for which he became famous.

~~~
zimpenfish
Wikipedia says the von Neumann version of the NashEq was published in 1944
when Schelling was just graduating. And also that Cournot published a version
in 1838...

~~~
CurtMonash
Technically, it's true that:

\-- The Von Neumann Min-Max Theorem is a special case of the existence of Nash
Equilibria. \-- Proving the original Min-Max Theorem isn't any any easier to
do directly than is proving the existence of Nash Equilibria in general.

That said, my dissertation was an extension of the Min-Max Theorem, and I
basically didn't think about Nash Equilibria once the whole time I was working
on it.

THAT said, my dissertation was an independent proof of the theorem of Mertens
and Neymann. Their proof seemed closer to the Fixed-Point Theorem kinds of
techniques that Nash used.

Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that Tom himself didn't engage in that kind of
mathematics.

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aligajani
He was such an intellectual powerhouse.

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patkai
Unfortunately the Kindle version of The Strategy of Conflict is unavailable.

~~~
auggierose
But you can buy it on iBooks. Just did.

