Robert Bell (3) (1942–)

My eyes are too old to be reading upside down.

This is a fascinating book, one of the first attempts to apply game theory in everyday life. As a result, some of the situations have a very Seventies-ish feel. (e.g. there is a chapter -- I kid you not -- about whether a woman should pursue a rape charge against a man who assaulted her. And there is one about venereal disease which assumes that all venereal diseases can simply be cured and vanish). Some of that is very uncomfortable today. The mathematics, though, is sound.

The problem is that, in this sort of game theory, the key is generally to figure out which outcomes you like best -- if you don't know what you want to happen, you can't figure out how to get there! So you have to rank your outcomes, from most preferred to least preferred.

Simple enough, except that this crazy book insists on ranking outcomes in a "lowerarchy" rather than a "hierarchy." You don't list your first choice first, and so on down, so that #1 is your first choice, etc. Instead, the preferred choice is at the bottom.

This sounds trivial. I know it's trivial. It really is. But half the book is devoted to discussions between characters to figure out their lowerarchies, and the lowerarchy is then used to figure out how to play the game. But lowerarchies are so unlike the way we usually prioritize things that I found it very hard to remember them -- I kept wondering "is 1 the best choice or the worst?" So I had to keep looking back and forth between the lowerarchy and the table showing the results of each strategy. This was so distracting that it certainly affected my ability to read and understand this book.

If you aren't worried about which is up and which is down, and are willing to read a book with a lot of out-of-date social ideas, this could be very useful. Just be sure you know which way is up before you start reading.… (mer)