doodcool612

If nothing else, this crazy day has shown that in the internet age, random acts of art and expression can have huge repercussions, as long as the President is dumb enough to stand in front of them.

What would you say to budding artists and pranksters on the internet who want to use their talents for good?

It is a process problem and an acceptance of incompetence on our part.

These are mutually exclusive. The design of a game, in the game theory sense of the word, can concretely affect player decision making.

For example, consider the prisoner's dilemma. Two innocent men are charged with a crime and given a choice: falsely accuse the other guy or maintain their innocence. If they both accuse each other, they both get two years in prison. If neither accuses the other, they both get one year for an unrelated charge. If one accuses and the other maintains their innocence, the accuser gets to go free and the other will get three years.

Can we predict how the prisoners will behave?

Yes. The game is designed such that regardless of innocence, your mathematically optimal strategy is always to accuse the other guy, virtually guaranteeing that you both go to jail. Can we call the prisoners incompetent? No, if anything we should be calling them "competent enough to recognize a mathematically optimal strategy."

But the prisoner's dilemma is unlike the budget negotiations in a key way: the meta-game. The prisoner's dilemma has only the one game: prisoners have absolutely no choice as to whether to play or not, so the balance of power in the game of "should we play the game" is entirely balanced at exactly zero. This is not the case when it comes to Congressional budget negotiations, whereby lawmakers can change the process by which budgets negotiation games are played.

So that begs the question: how is the game of "should we play the game or change it" being played? Or more to the point, if we are to maintain that our leaders are "incompetent," whose decisions and which are causing the incompetence? Is there anything we can do to change the incentives?

So when you say,

It is not a party problem. They all do it.

I'm going to interpret this as meaning "both parties [hold the government hostage in order to get what they want.]" But this is not just an empirical claim, but a mathematical one: not only can we calculate an optimal equilibrium with regard to the game of budget negotiations, but the power balance regarding the meta-game, the game regarding whether we should play the game or change the game, is exactly equal, such that both parties are equally culpable for a shutdown.

I find this unlikely, or at least, remarkably coincidental.

To illustrate, consider the following game:

Joe and Beth are moving to a small apartment and they need to decide what to do with their dog. Joe wants to euthanize the dog. Beth wants to pay for the dog to live on a farm. Their teacher suggests they play a game of rock paper scissors, and allow the winner to make the final decision. Joe is better at rock paper scissors than Beth, (edit: and will beat her if they play.)

Can we calculate the fate of their dog? No. We do not yet have enough information about the balance of power regarding the meta-game to calculate whether the game of rock paper scissors actually gets played at all, and because we can calculate the outcome of the game of rock paper scissors, the decision to play the game at all is in fact the decision determining the fate of the dog.

So now consider the "game" of budget negotiations. We can clearly see that playing the game leads to an optimal strategy: shut down the government and hold it hostage. In the same way that the prisoners of the prisoner's dilemma cannot unilaterally deviate from the optimal strategy, the decision to set the rules of the game to be as they are is the decision to shut down the government, not the decision to play the optimal strategy.

So in order to ascribe equal responsibility for our current predicament (i.e. "both parties do it") we have to look at the power dynamics regarding the meta-game. Who is deciding how the "game" of negotiations works? And if the power balance is exactly equal, then we can reasonably ascribe equal culpability to both parties.

But I find that unlikely because there is a very simple test to find out who is dictating the meta-game. Who is getting what they want in the long-term?

In the same way that we can deduce future action in the case of the prisoner's dilemma, we can calculate past action by calculating the optimal strategies. In the example of Beth and Joe's dog, if we know the game of rock paper scissors eventually was played, then we can calculate two things: 1) the dog died and 2) Joe controlled the meta-game.

Who has the power to change the game? (Edit: I do not comment on this, as to keep my statements entirely non-partisan.) Why isn't the game being changed? Because there must exist an incentive for he that could change it to not do so.

So if you really want to fix the system, whining about "both parties" is worse than useless, because it actively promotes anti-intellectualism. Math isn't a partisan thing. I have made absolutely no partisan statements, or even historical statements, here at all. Any one of these points could be marked right or wrong on a math/econ exam.

If you really want to fix the system, the only answer is to identify exactly which incentives are leading to which behaviors. That means not only identifying what design decisions are creating negative optimal strategies for both parties, but calculating which party is controlling the meta-game and then ascribing correct blame as to put pressure on that party to stop shutting down the government.

Edit: fixed the numbers in the prisoner's dilemma.

This argument reminds me a lot of the arguments my Green Party friends make. I can wax poetic as much as the next guy about how things "ought to be" this way or that, but at some point we have to ponder what structural design elements of our government are making some things a mathematical certainty.

We have a first past the post system. You can hate political parties. I can hate political parties. But at some point we just have to accept that the political system we were born into makes two parties a mathematical certainty in the long run, and there is absolutely no indication that it's going to change any time soon.

We're not going to get anything done by wagging our fingers at Congress like "these issues should have been resolved in the preceding months." Yeah, no kidding. Government shutdowns are bad. Thanks for the insight, Captain. The problem isn't Congress. It's America, where it's politically expedient to, say, refuse the Constitutional duty to fill a Supreme Court position leaving the highest court in the land, not to mention swathes of federal judgeships, unfilled.

When it become politically dangerous to sabotage government for personal gain then we won't have chronic shutdowns. When we hold specific people and not just "Congress, vaguely" accountable for hostage tactics, then we won't have gridlock.

My understanding is that it’s less about incentivizing people to literally go out and buy stuff right now and more aimed at giving them the latitude to stay home if they get sick.

If you live paycheck to paycheck and are otherwise healthy, it may be tempting to continue working, even in the food service industry, if you are unsure you have the virus. That’s because the stress of poverty is very real and immediate whereas somebody old you don’t know who might die by your actions is very removed and impersonal. This behavior is absolutely detrimental to society, so the government is investing in giving people some breathing room, on the assumption that it will cost the economy way, way more than just a thousand dollars per person if we do nothing and leave people to their own devices to infect everybody, which could turn a crisis into a clusterfuck.

Trolls will tell you that Trump is being investigated more than previous administrations because of a grand media conspiracy, but the truth is dead simple: Trump's actions have been cartoonishly corrupt.

Remember when instead of releasing his tax returns he just showed us how many folders he had? Presumably those folders just had the words "I can't believe I'm getting away with this" written over and over and over again.

Remember how Don Jr took a meeting with a Russian lobbyist specifically to get dirt on his political opponent, explicitly as part of the "Russian effort to aid the (Trump) campaign"? Remember all the lies the campaign told us about that meeting?

Remember how Trump refused to put his assets in a blind trust? Then he told us all he had "no business dealings in Russia," and then we found out about Trump Tower Moscow, all while he was praising Russia and Putin as a presidential candidate?

Trump was being investigated for this scandal because Cambridge Analytica had ties to Russia. Trump's campaign was aided by the Russians, against our laws. His campaign was investigated for his ties with Russia because he famously said, on national television, "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” referring to stolen emails that the Russians stole later that same day.

He was being investigated because he did some crazy, crazy shit, not because of some grand media conspiracy.