The puzzle that Gödel was describing would come to be known as P vs NP. To oversimplify, it asks: can every mathematical question which can be checked quickly also be solved quickly? For instance: you are given a half-complete Sudoku puzzle. Is there a legal solution? If someone were to show you a solution, you could quickly verify whether it was legal. If you used a larger grid, the solution would take longer to check, but not exponentially so[1.  In fact the length of time would grow polynomially – hence P.].

But establishing that there is a legal solution is much slower. There might be quintillions of possible ways of filling it out; the number grows exponentially with the size of the grid. Checking them all one by one might take millions of years even on a powerful computer, if the grid is large enough.

What Gödel wanted to know was: is there some algorithm that could solve the Sudoku (or similar problems) as quickly as we could check a solution? P vs NP is one of the great outstanding questions of mathematics: it has profound implications, but no one has been able to prove it, one way or the other.

The Man from the Future, Ananyo Bhattacharya’s fascinating, fast-moving intellectual biography of von Neumann, made me think of P vs NP. Not because von Neumann solved it; but because von Neumann, in Bhattacharya’s telling, provided solutions to many other previously unsolved problems, in dozens of different fields; others simply had to check them, and expand on them. There is, I think, some discomfort about calling people “geniuses” these days, or in admitting that intelligence is a real thing or that it shapes history – but von Neumann was a genius, and his extraordinary intelligence shaped the modern world.

He was not an economist, but he developed the use of fixed-point theorems in economics in a paper which the historian Roy Weintraub calls “the single most important article in mathematical economics”, and which inspired “half a dozen” Nobel laureates.

His work on game theory – he invented the field, and coined the term “zero-sum game” – inspired at least half a dozen more. Game theory also transformed the study of evolution, inspiring the work of Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and Richard Dawkins.

He developed utility theory, the basis of modern economics. In 2011 Daniel Kahneman, another economics Nobel laureate (who won his Nobel partly for building on von Neumann’s game-theory ideas), called it“ the most important theory in the social sciences”.

Some of his last work, with Stanislaw Ulam on “cellular automata” – grids of squares that turn on and off according to simple rules – shaped modern computer science in thousands of ways, notably inspiring John McCarthy, who would go on to coin the term “artificial intelligence”.

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Von Neumann’s genius was apparent early. In 1915, at the age of 11, he had gone to the famous gymnasium school in his native Budapest; the “legendary” maths teacher, László Rátz, immediately realised that von Neumann was beyond his ability to teach, and sent him for extra tuition at the local university. There he was mentored by Gábor Szegö, later head of Stanford’s maths department, who was “moved to tears” by his brilliance.

At 17, still at high school, he partly rescued Cantor’s set theory, the basis of much mathematical theory, from a crippling paradox. A couple of years later, he helped reconcile Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger’s rival models of quantum mechanics. In the early Thirties, he met the astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and worked with him on general relativity and the behaviour of stellar clusters. Chandrasekhar would later tell an interviewer, “If I say, ‘He reminds me of von Neumann,’ that’s about the best compliment I can give anyone.”

Von Neumann read some Alan Turing research which imagined a hypothetical computing machine, and saw how to build a working computer. The paper he produced building on Turing’s ideas is considered “the birth certificate of modern computers”, according to the computer scientist Wolfgang Coy. With his wife Kläri, and Ulam, he pioneered Monte Carlo simulations, vital now in climate modelling and a million other fields.

In almost every sphere of scientific inquiry – physics, biology, maths, economics, the social sciences, computing – you find von Neumann’s fingerprints. There is a Wikipedia page of “List of things named after John von Neumann.” Were it not for him, our understanding of the world would be decades behind where it is.

What created this genius? Bhattacharya does not speculate a great deal, but there are things worth considering. First, simple genetics: his family was high-achieving. His father was a doctor of law and an economic adviser to the Hungarian government; his uneducated maternal grandfather apparently could “add or multiply numbers into the millions” in his head instantly, a trick von Neumann emulated. The family was “puzzled” by their son’s inability to play the piano properly at the age of five, suggesting rather higher expectations than most. But it turned out to be because he “had taken to propping up books on his music stand so he could read while ‘practising’”.

He also grew up in a fertile environment. Around the turn of the 20th century, the Budapest Jewish community of which he was part produced an astonishing number of great thinkers. Near-contemporaries included Dennis Gabor, “who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971 for inventing the hologram”; Theodore von Kármán, after whom the “Kármán line” is named, denoting the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space; and Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard, three of the greatest minds behind the Manhattan Project. The atomic bomb has been described as a “Hungarian high school science fair project”.

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The Hungarians who worked on America’s atomic weapons programme in the Thirties and Forties were known as “the Martians” by the other physicists – the joke being that the only way of explaining them was that super-intelligent aliens must have come to Budapest in the late 19th century and had babies with the locals. Von Neumann was the most alien of the lot.

But there was some accident of history that meant that European university departments at that time were disproportionately Jewish, and Belle Epoque Budapest, which was going through a less than usually antisemitic period, had a large and well-integrated Jewish population. Von Neumann himself speculated that insecurity drove this Jewish success – they recognised that Hungary’s tolerance might evaporate at any moment, and that they faced “the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction”.

The tolerance did evaporate, in Hungary and elsewhere. Von Neumann, along with Teller, Wigner and the rest, had already left for Princeton, but Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany devastated their universities: 15% of physicists and 19% of mathematicians were dismissed, including 20 who had won or would win Nobel prizes.

Ironically, this may have lost Germany the war: analysis suggests that the loss of Jewish scientists damaged German science for decades. Werner Heisenberg, a German quantum physicist, was branded a “white Jew” for believing in Einstein’s theories, despite being a nationalist. He later said that it was not worth Germany pursuing nuclear weapons, because they wouldn’t be ready in time to affect the war: he believed this because he thought Germany’s nuclear research was well ahead of other nations. “As it was,” says Bhattacharya. “Until 1933.”

So von Neumann, along with Wigner and others, ended up in Princeton — and then at the next-door Institute for Advanced Study, a sort of intellectual all-star team, where great brains were enticed from around the world with vast salaries, no undergrads to teach, and the promise that they could just think big thoughts. Einstein was there, along with Gödel, Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, Ulam, and a host of others. It was an environment made for a certain kind of hard-to-pigeonhole genius, able to wander from subject to subject simply by walking around campus, surrounded by brilliant weirdos.

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Von Neumann is compelling evidence, I think, that individual genius is important and influential. Yes, he worked in a series of collaborations; yes, he built on the work of others. But he seems to have pushed on, or sometimes simply created, entire subfields of science, into areas that no one else realised could exist. The economist Oskar Morgernstern remembers him rapidly devising utility theory, immediately overturning economic orthodoxy: “But didn’t anyone see that?”, von Neumann asked.

It’s fashionable to say that intelligence isn’t real, or that we can’t define it, or that it’s a Western colonial construct. But the word points to a real thing: there is some quality which rocks don’t have, and which mice have a bit of, and which chimpanzees have more of, and humans have a lot of; and which is something like problem-solving ability or ability to achieve goals. Calling it intelligence seems as good as anything. It is this ability which has allowed humanity to shape the world, and it is this ability that some people – von Neumann among them – seem to have in unusually large measure.

Via scientific and technological progress, intelligence has made human life better. But in itself, intelligence is morally neutral: it can serve any end, good or ill, to which it is put. Von Neumann is a case in point. He developed computers partly to better predict the behaviour of explosive shockwaves and ballistic shells; he designed two different kinds of nuclear weapon, including the plutonium implosion bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki; his game-theoretic ideas led him to suggest using atom bombs in a first strike on Russia, and he was part of the inspiration for Doctor Strangelove. He believed that all this was in the interest of America, his adopted country, and no doubt of humanity; but not everyone would agree with him. First and foremost he wanted to solve puzzles.

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I put the book down wondering if it is still possible to encourage and harness genius. Perhaps it’s as simple as putting lots of clever people together and letting them think weird thoughts — and Von Neumann and his colleagues were often weird people. Or perhaps it is a true accident, and the only lesson is randomness. Perhaps the proposed new field of research into “progress studies” will yield some ideas as to how to recreate that environment in which Von Neumann and his fellow weirdos flourished.

I wondered, too, if John von Neumann was well enough to understand the P vs NP puzzle when he received that letter from Gödel. For it is a wonderful metaphor for genius. I can dimly understand, for instance, Turing’s solution to the “Halting Problem”, or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, or Russell’s set paradox that undermined mathematics. (They’re all based on the “liar paradox” – the statement “this statement is a lie”, which is false if true or true if false.) But it often takes no great brilliance to understand an idea once it has been brought forth: checking the Sudoku solution is relatively straightforward. Finding that idea in the space of possible ideas, though — solving the great sprawling Sudokus of science and maths, as Von Neumann did time and again, that takes genius.

It seems relevant, now we’re in lockdown. I’d been thinking about it a lot recently with all the images of Columbia Road Flower Market, and the Tube, and various Norfolk coastal resorts, all rammed with people. Presumably those photos were taken by humans who were at the time in Columbia Road Flower Market, or on the Tube. You’re not in a crowd; you are a crowd. No doubt you have excellent reasons for being there, but no doubt so does everyone else. Hence, I presume, the lockdown.

It’s the same with panic-buying (with the caveat that true “panic-buying” and major stockpiling probably isn’t actually going on very much, as the excellent Stephen Bush of the New Statesman points out). In a chemist’s near my house, a parent was grumbling that all the Calpol had gone: “It’s so selfish. What if my kid gets ill?” But, of course, everyone else is thinking the exact same thing; that’s why there are no Calpols.

These concerns all map on very neatly to game theory, and specifically to the game-theory ideas known as “coordination problems”. The most famous two are probably the “prisoners’ dilemma” and the “tragedy of the commons”.

In the prisoners’ dilemma, two people are suspected of a crime, and are locked up separately. The police have enough evidence to convict them on a lesser charge, but they’re told – separately – that if they grass up their accomplice, the accomplice will get a longer sentence and they will go free. Of course, if they both turn grass, then they’ll both get long sentences (but these won’t be as long as if they were to stay schtum while their buddy narks on them).

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The options are called “cooperate” (with your accomplice) or “defect”. So if you both cooperate, you get one year. If you both defect, you get two years. But if you defect and your accomplice cooperates, you walk free and they get three years (and vice versa).

Obviously, the best outcome from the point of view of minimising the total number of years served is for both to cooperate. You each serve one year; it’s just two years in total. But if you know your buddy is going to cooperate, it’s best to defect, because then you get away.

But your buddy knows that too! So he will defect. But then: if he defects, it’s still best for you to defect, so you get two years rather than three.

So even though you both could have got out after one year by cooperating, the optimal, “rational” (in the economic sense) decision is always to defect, so you end up serving two years. (Watch this gameshow clip for a remarkably dramatic demonstration; it’s so illustrative of the dilemma that it attracted academic attention.)

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The tragedy of the commons is a similar but grander-scale idea. Imagine you have some common resource: a meadow where everyone can graze their livestock. There’s enough grass to graze 100 sheep comfortably and there are 10 farmers; if everyone keeps a flock of 10, the meadow will remain healthy and the animals will have enough to eat.

But if one farmer decides to add an 11th sheep, he gains all the value of that sheep, but pays only 10% of the cost to the resource. Of course, the other farmers make the exact same calculation, so everyone puts on an 11th sheep, and a 12th. The meadow gets overgrazed; the sheep become malnourished; and everyone ends up poorer than they would have if they’d just cooperated, but everyone was acting perfectly rationally (again, in the economic sense) at every juncture.

If you could coordinate the responses of the different agents – the prisoners or the farmers – the best outcome would be easy to achieve. If the prisoners could just talk, or some authority simply ordered the farmers to stick to 10 and punished those who didn’t, that would be the end of the problem. But the prisoners can’t talk, and there’s no Farming Czar to step in.

These are just thought experiments, but they turn up in real life. In the Cold War, the USA and USSR could have spent billions of dollars/roubles on hospitals and schools and made everyone’s life better, or on lots of big missiles with nuclear bombs on the top. You can cooperate and build the schools, or you can defect and build the missiles. As the thought experiment would predict, they ended up building the missiles.

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And the parallels between the tragedy of the commons and the climate situation — it’s in everyone’s interest if we all reduce carbon use, but if you do emit carbon, you gain all the benefit of your economic activity while paying only a tiny fraction of the cost — are almost too obvious to state. (Although I did just state them anyway.) Again, if some world government were to be set up and punish countries for emitting too much, it would be simple to solve; but no real world government exists, so coordination remains hard.

In the time of the coronavirus these problems are being illustrated amazingly starkly. It’s in everyone’s interests if everyone strictly self-isolates and washes their hands 10 times a day. But these actions are costly – self-isolation is lonely, and thanks to the washing my hands at least are red and cracked and look like they’ve aged 20 years. So if everyone else were to do it, but you carried on walking around, licking lampposts, cuddling strangers and never washing your hands, just as normal, then you’d gain all the benefit of that while (assuming you’re relatively young and healthy) paying only a fraction of the increased risk.

Similarly, it’s in everyone’s best interests if we all agree to only buy one bottle of Calpol so the shelves are always full – but if you don’t trust other people to do that, it’s in your interest to buy extra, to make sure you have some. So everyone buys more than they need, spending too much money, and other people end up with none, even though there’s enough to go around.

That’s before you get into the utilitarian calculus: the moral mathematics of “if I do X, it will probably cause X good things but Y bad things; is X bigger or smaller than Y?” Doctors are going to have to decide who lives and who dies. Decisions made by politicians will do the same, and not always as obviously as you might think; Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, points out that during the Ebola crisis, more people died of malaria than the actual epidemic, because all the resources that would have been directed to curing them went to stopping the spread of the disease. 

But even on a personal level, we are going to have to make those sorts of decisions. If I take my children to the park — even if I am incredibly careful — I am slightly increasing the risk that they or I will pass on the disease. There is a small but non-zero chance that someone will die because of that decision. But if I don’t take them to the park, their lives will very probably be slightly worse. How do you trade low-probability but high-impact events off against high-probability, low-impact ones like that? How many days at the park is worth one death? The answer is not “infinity”; we don’t think that lives are infinitely valuable. We take small risks of terrible things happening all the time, in order for nice things to very likely happen: we cross the road to the restaurant, we drive to the seaside.

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Now, though, those decisions are being made starkly obvious. And the awful thing is that sometimes it is rational, on the utilitarian calculus. If your children gain +10 Happiness Points from going to the park, someone dying is worth -100,000 Happiness Points, and the risk of someone dying from your specific actions is 0.005%, then since 0.005% of -100,000 is -5, the park visit is worth it. How do you factor that in, when you’re already struggling to overcome the Molochian trap of the coordination problem?

I should admit: at the weekend, we took our children to a local park, moved as far away from others as we could, and played football and frisbee just between the four of us. Around us – at a distance – we could see dozens of others, all slowly moving around in their families or other groups. It looked like everyone was horribly aware of the utilitarian trade-off they were making, even if they weren’t thinking in actual numbers. 

Millions of people around the country have been finding themselves in the middle of a massive multiplayer game of something like the coordination problems described above, played for real-world stakes of lives and happiness. People are having to try to work out what the right thing to do is, and sometimes having to do the right thing even though it is technically irrational — it will have worse outcomes for that person whatever everyone else does. I don’t blame them for not solving problems on the fly that people have spent entire PhDs on.

Coordination problems are not impossible to solve for the actors involved. The Cold War ended; progress has been made on carbon emissions. But it’s hard, and it takes time we don’t have. The Government’s lockdown represents the equivalent of the Farming Czar coming in and ordering everyone to cooperate. We’re not stuck in traffic, we are traffic, and right now we need the roads to be clear.

Yudkowsky is a strange character; he’s a key figure in my own book, The AI Does Not Hate You, about a group of people who worry about (among other things) an AI apocalypse. But he and they are also interested in why we are so bad at fixing the world’s problems.

Dominic Cummings, the senior adviser to the Prime Minister, is also interested in these ideas. I know this because we mix in similar internet circles. His latest post is a job ad, asking for maths nerds, data scientists, project managers and general “weirdos” to come and work with him in No 10. His first line is a quote from a 2017 Yudkowsky tweet, about “the bad Nash equilibrium in which the US and many other governments are stuck”. 

A few lines later, he mentions “low-hanging fruit — trillion dollar bills lying on the street”, an apparent reference to an ongoing theme in Inadequate Equilibria, based on an old joke about economics. The joke goes like this. There are two economists walking down the street; one of them says “Hey look! Someone dropped a £20 note.” And the other one says: “Well, it can’t be a real £20 note, or someone would have picked it up already.”

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The joke refers to the efficient markets hypothesis. If you think you can get rich quick by buying stocks, you’re probably wrong, because millions of smart people are also trying to do the same thing. And they’ll all buy stocks in the companies that they think will do well, so the stocks of those companies will go up. If a stock is even a tiny bit underpriced, hedge funds can make billions by buying it, and they’re watching every second, so it’s very unlikely that you — Random Citizen X — will have better information than they do. 

The efficient markets hypothesis obviously isn’t completely true. It is possible for people to make money in stocks; in reality, you do sometimes find notes on the floor. But it is mainly true: most stocks are appropriately priced, and if you were to see a £20 on the floor of King’s Cross Station in London with thousands of people walking past every hour, and it had been there all week, then you could confidently predict that something weird was going on.

But, says Yudkowsky, if you take this idea on a bit, you can end up accidentally proving that nothing can be wrong with the world. If you think that, say, your city’s public transport is overpriced and inefficient, then obviously someone could open a cheaper, more efficient bus service, undercutting the existing ones. It would make lots of money and put the other ones out of business. So saying “the public transport system is bad” is a bit like saying “there is a £20 note on the floor of King’s Cross and no one has picked it up”. Medicine can’t be improved because, if it could be, someone would already have done it. Science can’t be broken because if it was, someone would have made an un-broken version and won all the Nobel prizes. House prices can’t be too high. If you’re not careful, you end up as Leibniz or Dr Pangloss, saying that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. 

And yet, Yudkowsky points out among several other examples, 33% of babies with short bowel syndrome die in the US because the standard FDA-approved intravenous nutrient fluid has the wrong mix of lipids. The correct mix has been known for decades, is just as cheap, and prevents all the deaths. No one wants babies to die. But somehow it doesn’t get fixed. This is very hard to square with the Leibnizian position.

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I think this is what Cummings is driving at. It’s hard to tell, because it’s just a job ad, and even his longer pieces seem to me, usually, like a grab-bag of loosely connected tech/management/AI buzzwords, rather than a coherent argument. But I think he’s interested in why things go wrong even when no one wants them to. It’s easy to blame bad people — the Tories, or billionaires, say — and maybe that’s sometimes true, but I suspect it’s usually a comforting self-deception; it’s much gloomier to think it’s a systemic failing of human thought.

Yudkowsky suggests that there are three main ways in which societies can get stuck in these “inadequate equilibria”, bad situations that no one wants but which we can’t get out of. 

The first is bad incentives. The efficient markets hypothesis, and the free market in general, relies on people acting self-interestedly. If everyone knew that the £20 lying on the floor of King’s Cross would have to be donated to HMRC if they picked it up, then people would be less likely to do so. 

An example of this that Yudkowsky uses is the Japanese central bank, which for years kept a tight monetary policy. Many economic bloggers, including Scott Sumner, suggested that printing more money would be better. But because the Japanese central bank’s monetary policy was set by a committee of a few bankers, none of whom would make any extra money if Japan’s economy improved, the market had no way of influencing it.

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The second cause is bad information. If I am buying a used car from you, I might ask if the car is any good. You will say “yes”. But you would probably say that even if it weren’t. So I can’t work out what the right price to pay for it is. So the used-car market becomes a lottery: good cars which should sell for more money don’t, and bad cars get sold for more than they’re worth. You can’t tell, among all the people saying “this used car is great”, which ones are telling the truth. 

Similarly, in cases like the short bowel syndrome babies, there probably are hundreds or thousands of parents and doctors screaming: “Look, babies are dying because of this simple mistake.” But loads more people are also screaming about babies dying because of vaccines or austerity or any number of more or less spurious reasons. And it’s hard to tell which ones are real and which ones aren’t. So lots of real ones get ignored and lots of fake ones get picked up. You can’t tell which ones are telling the truth. 

The third and final cause is the “bad Nash equilibria” mentioned at the beginning. A Nash equilibrium, in game theory, is a stable state in which the players cannot improve the situation by changing strategies. For instance, in the prisoner’s dilemma (if played only once), the two players will always do best if they defect, even though that’s worse than if both of them cooperate, because if one cooperates while the other defects it’s worse for the sucker. You need to coordinate both players to cooperate at the same time, and that’s hard.

An analogous situation (lifted from Scott Alexander) is that no one wants to be on Facebook — it’s terrible and incomprehensible and it steals your data. But no one can leave, because going off and forming your own social media system isn’t going to work. You’d just be there on your own. To leave, you need to coordinate millions of people to leave at the same time, and that’s hard. Google tried it, and failed utterly; if Google can’t do it, you can’t.

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I think (I hope) that Cummings’s job ad is about trying to get people who think in these terms into places of government. I don’t know whether it will make a serious difference. But there are problems in the governance of the UK which analogise quite well to these situations. 

For instance, incentives. No one I’ve ever spoken to who’s involved in drug policy — not academics, not clinicians, not police — thinks that it’s a good idea to imprison people for possession offences. And after they leave power, every politician seems to say how important it is that we stop doing it: even former home secretaries who could once have done something about it. But still, we do it, because the people in power are not incentivised to save the exchequer money or to save lives – they’re incentivised not to look soft on crime.

Or, bad information. I notice that Cummings mentions Philip Tetlock in his blog post. Tetlock, whom I’ve written about before, is the thinker behind the Good Judgement Project and “superforecasting”. The groups he works with get the best results — better than CIA analysts — at predicting future world events, and there are fairly simple methods that they use to improve those skills. A better skill at forecasting the future would be immensely useful for the UK government. But there are thousands of cranks pushing “one weird trick”-type solutions, and it’s very hard for government advisers or ministers to tease out which are good and which are bad.

And finally, Nash equilibria. I think most people who care about the subject nowadays agree that our First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system is no longer fit for purpose. But to change the system, you first have to win under FPTP, and once you’ve won under FPTP, your best strategy is to keep playing under it. To get out of it, you have to coordinate all the players to change at the same time, and that’s hard.

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Bringing in maths nerds and weirdos won’t fix any of this on its own. The incentives and bad information and coordination problems will still exist. But it’s pleasing that someone close to government is thinking about it. Anecdotally, lots of nerdy oddballs in DM groups and internet forums I hang around in, people who would never consider themselves for government jobs normally, are thinking about applying; I saw a post on an effective altruism site calling for people to apply. Maybe it’s just that these are my sort of people, but I’d be happy to see more nerdy, techie types in government.

It could go wrong. Lots of very sensible clever people I admire have written things pointing out that a naive belief in the power of maths to fix problems won’t get us anywhere, and that the Civil Service is actually much less lacking in maths-ability than the ministers who make the decisions. And that’s true — and I also think that there’s probably a lot of hard-to-understand local knowledge in the Civil Service, and if you sweep all that aside and replace it with nerdy 23-year-olds it’ll go badly wrong (Chesterton’s fence and all that). It’s a bit unfair to say Cummings is only interested in maths and science nerds — only one of the seven job categories he mentions is explicitly STEM, the “data scientist” – but that’s clearly his focus.

But I do think there are some relatively simply fixed problems in the governance of this country which could, in theory, be fixed quite easily, by a government with a big majority which doesn’t need to care about short-term popularity and which is willing to do some fairly unusual things.

What about, say, some proper A-B testing of policies? It can, as I’ve mentioned before, do real good but which is weirdly unpopular in political situations. Or how about taking some hot-button things out of direct political control (I’ve seen people suggest the NHS!), in the same way the Bank of England was by Blair? That would avoid some of the bad Nash equilibria, and the bad incentives – especially if combined with reforms that made those directly in charge of it responsible for whether it works or not.

But don’t ask me. I’m not weird enough to apply. Maybe we should just pick up a few of those £20 notes lying on the floor of King’s Cross Station instead.

They’re a strange lot: smart and thoughtful, but strange. I wrote a book about them; they worry about AI destroying the world, but also about thinking accurately, about making good predictions, about doing the most good they can via charitable donations.

I know that Cummings is a fan, because he regularly quotes them. His blogroll includes links to LessWrong, Slate Star Codex and Eliezer Yudkowsky, three of the key parts of the Rationalsphere. His blog posts – like those of Scott Alexander, author of Slate Star Codex – are immensely long, although Alexander’s are clear and funny and designed to hold the reader’s hand through a complex argument, while Cummings’s tend to be a grab-bag of talking points thrown together with no discernible – to me, at least – structure. But a lot of the material, and the names mentioned, are similar.

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Anyway. Yesterday, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, decided to suspend, or “prorogue”, parliament for five weeks around conference season. He and his outriders have argued that 1) it’s normal behaviour and that 2) it’s to push through his domestic agenda; but 1) it’s not (it’s the longest prorogation since 1945), and 2) it’s very obviously intended to reduce the amount of time available to backbenchers to legislate against no-deal or otherwise get in the Government’s way. BuzzFeed’s Alex Wickham reports that they have various other plans to further obstruct any parliamentary oversight.

It reminded me of something, and I was trying to work out what it was. And I realised: it was the classic application of game theory to the game of chicken. Imagine you’re playing chicken – that is, driving your car head-on towards another car. Whoever swerves first loses. What’s your best strategy?

One game-theoretic answer is: you ostentatiously unscrew your steering wheel and throw it out of the window.

On one level, it’s limiting your options, so it seems like a bad plan. But from your opponent’s point of view, it is a credible commitment that you are going to continue in a straight line. If the opponent wants to avoid disaster, they have to swerve, and lose the game. The example was first given by Bertrand Russell in his 1959 book Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare.

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Russell thought it was a stupid idea. But the principle of credible commitment to a course of action formed a key part of the thinking of other game theorists, such as Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling and John von Neumann, who were important in the development of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine – essentially, nuclear chicken. Ostentatiously commit to the idea that in the face of any aggression you will render much of the globe uninhabitable for millennia, and your opponent will not dare to be aggressive. Richard Nixon approvingly called it the “madman theory” and it is most associated with Schelling.

This is pure speculation, I should say – I have no special insight into Cummings’s mind – but I have a feeling this is what he’s doing here. I know he knows about this stuff: “Schelling points” and other game-theoretical terms are part of the jargon in the blogs we both read. Cummings has posts tagged “game theory” in his blog and discusses John von Neumann at length. If I’m right, Cummings has convinced Johnson to throw the Government’s steering wheel out of the window. By making it harder for Britain to change course from its headlong path towards no-deal, he thinks he can force the opponent to swerve.

I don’t want to buy into the widespread narrative that Cummings is some sort of all-seeing genius, though, if this is really what he’s doing. The reason the ostentatious removal of the steering wheel works in chicken is because you have one clearly defined opponent of a similar stature to you. If you’re both driving Vauxhall Zafiras, then the crash will be equally bad for both of you. The reason it worked, if indeed it did work, in the Cold War is because there were two obvious main actors, the US and the USSR, and nuclear annihilation would be comparably bad for both.

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How politics makes us irrational

By Tom Chivers

It’s not clear that the same is true in this case. For one thing, who’s the opponent? Is it the EU? Or is it Parliament? In Cummings’ and Johnson’s minds, it could be any one of them. Maybe they’re trying to force Parliament to vote through whatever deal he gives them, because the alternative will be a disastrous no deal and no time to fix it. Or maybe they’re trying to force the EU to make changes to the backstop because there’s no time for Parliament to block no deal. When you’ve got three cars in a game of chicken, it is much harder to model the outcomes.

More importantly: if it’s the EU, then it’s not two Vauxhall Zafiras. It’s more like a Fiat Cinquecento driving towards an oncoming train. A no-deal Brexit will hurt the EU, but much less than it would hurt Britain, because the EU is much bigger than Britain. And there are worse outcomes for the EU, such as other countries seeing that they blinked first and trying similar strategies to get favourable deals from them. It may be that no-deal is the least bad option available for them if Britain commits to it.

As I said: I’m speculating. But it fits my existing mental model of Dominic Cummings, which is that he reads these fascinating, interesting ideas from brilliant people, and takes completely the wrong message from them. For one thing, a key principle of the Rationalist blogosphere that we both admire is the “principle of charity”, the idea that “if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs”, rather than assuming people are stupid or evil.

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Is the Conservative Party brain dead?

By Peter Franklin

M’colleague Peter Franklin thinks that it’s unfair to accuse Cummings of having an “everyone-is-an-idiot-apart-from-me” attitude. That may be true, but he certainly doesn’t apply the principle of charity widely; he openly derides as a “courtier” the late former cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, for instance, who others have described as “the smartest guy in the room”. He may be right, but it seems sensible to at least consider the possibility that this much-admired figure had some understanding of how the machinery of government worked which Cummings was missing.

Another, arguably more relevant, principle is what is known as “Chesterton’s fence”. The conservative Christian GK Chesterton said that reformers often want to remove things because they don’t understand what they’re there for: he imagines one coming across a fence in a field, and pulling it down, because he can’t see the point in it. The reformer is then gored by a bull.

A wiser reformer, says Chesterton, would have said: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” For Chesterton, the strange and sometimes incomprehensible workings of tradition are probably there for a reason, and if you start pulling on threads because they don’t look important, the whole thing might come apart.

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Could you predict Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

Cummings may work for the Conservative Party, but he is not a conservative, in the Chestertonian sense. He’s willing to erode the conventions of the British constitution, by suspending parliament for political reasons and trying to keep them from voting on a huge and important issue.

He’s got form. In 2010 he and Michael Gove forced through legislation on academy schools by fast-tracking it in a way usually reserved for emergency laws, things like counter-terrorism. Chesterton, and the “Rationalists” Cummings admires, would be deeply wary of eating away at the various little conventions and traditions which underpin British public life in the pursuit of a short-term goal.

My concern – one of my concerns – is that Cummings will come to be seen as representative of the Rationalists, because he quotes them and shares some of their concerns and interests. But at the risk of being uncharitable myself, I don’t think he really understands them. He thinks it’s all about seeing how everyone else is wrong, and applying game theory to politics, and all that. And those things are important.

But it’s also about looking at your own thinking, and seeing where you are going wrong, and taking steps to make sure that you’re not going to accidentally blow everything up with your brilliant ideas. I worry that Cummings isn’t playing some clever John von Neumannesque game, but driving his Fiat down the rails and expecting a train to swerve.

Tom Chivers’s book, The AI does not hate you, is out now