Game Theory and Why Most People Followed the Covid Consensus

The useful part

This portion of Chapter 16 provides an unforgettable explanation of how and why Covid dissidents were so few and far between within academia and industry. The chapter ends with a robust critique of the Bayh-Dole Act.] World War II ended when America dropped the atomic bombs named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese died in an instant and of radiation poisoning over the subsequent years.

How it works

• Because unorthodox thinking was needed, the US military funded an outside non-military corporation called RAND, an abbreviation for research and development.
• The RAND Corporation had carte blanche to hire whomever they wanted, to study whatever they wanted, to be independent of the military, and to go outside of the usual military thinking no matter how bizarre.
• Game theory strives to understand how people solve conflicts to their best interest in different situations.
• However, most pairs defect, insofar as if the other person snitches and they do not, the one prisoner will go free, while the other will spend four years (i.e., twice as much time) in prison.
• During the Cold War, America and Russia had been locked into a permanent defect (noncollaborative) response.

What to take from it

If you defect and maintain that the Covid-19 virus has a man-made signature, your paper will have trouble getting published. In this scenario, the two prisoners have been arrested for a crime and have been kept in solitary confinement with no means of communication. Each prisoner is then interviewed by the authorities in separate rooms regarding who is guilty for the offense.

Example or evidence

• Diseases—the same institution headed by Fauci for nearly 40 years—distributes $6 billion every year in research funding.
• If your paper finally was published, it would likely be in a fairly obscure journal.
• If that journal learned that the most influential and largest research funding agency in the world refused to be a part of your publication, your paper would likely be retracted.
• None of us have any idea what is in another person's mind.

Details worth keeping

Francis Matthews, Secretary of the Navy, advocated becoming "aggressors for peace." The mathematician John von Neuman, who was a pioneer in game theory, remarked: "If you say bomb them tomorrow, I say why not bomb them today?" Once Russia detonated its own nuclear bomb in 1949, America's nuclear monopoly ended. In its place, a nuclear arms race jumped into the stratosphere. Nuclear weapons forever changed warfare in unpredictable ways.

Related coverage

• Politicalwire: The debate over artificial intelligence increasingly looks like the ultimate prisoner's dilemma.
• Arstechnica: Simple games gain rich strategies in the face of noise.
• Econtalk: Incentives matter, sure.
• Plos: by Jnanajyoti Bhaumik, Naoki Masuda Various theoretical and empirical studies have accounted for why humans cooperate in competitive environments.
• Activistpost: The question serious analysts must ask is not "why do governments expand?" That is self-evident, a structural feature of any bureaucracy.