Where did "the game" come from ?

[starry-eyed pirate]

I wouldn’t be surprised if the name ‘the game’ was inspired by Game Theory and it’s classically referred to game The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

...

GAME THEORY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

‘Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences, most notably in economics, as well as in biology (particularly evolutionary biology and ecology), engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, social psychology, and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, or games, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others (Myerson, 1991).’

‘Von Neumann's work in game theory culminated in the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. This foundational work contains the method for finding mutually consistent solutions for two-person zero-sum games. During this time period, work on game theory was primarily focused on cooperative game theory, which analyzes optimal strategies for groups of individuals, presuming that they can enforce agreements between them about proper strategies.’

‘In 1950, the first discussion of the prisoner's dilemma appeared, and an experiment was undertaken on this game at the RAND corporation.’

...

Anyways there’s quite a lot on the subject, but that’s my hunch, as far as where the name derived from.  As far as the application of this setting goes I believe that many influences had been developing for some time previously, and I doubt Deiderich himself played much part in the overall creation of ‘the game’. I think he was important simply because he was running the perfect model of the type of organization, Synanon, in which to experiment with group dynamics in ways unfeasible in other areas of society. Synanon was relatively miniscule when compared to many larger interests concerned with sociology, social psychology, which were developing exponentially prior to Synanon. My guess is Deiderich did not find inspiration, inspiration found him.

Whether or not Charles Dederich participated in the actual "gaming exercises" at RAND, chances are, he was probably aware of them. After all, he was employed by Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica at the time. RAND was set up in Santa Monica right after WWII by the U.S. Air Force ...  under contract to and, for all I know, located in the same building as, the Douglas Aircraft Company.

Yeah, I respect the research, but don't really get it.  I have an intuitional sense that I don' think really compares...There's a manipulation that comes out a Dederich that fucks everyone after him, even though he's right and has insight.  You can't rely on anyone other than your clan. And even then you have to watch out.  Fuck $tr8.

Sorry, that wasn't a very clear or nice response.  I have been reading all the links on this thread and am finding all the history fascinating.  Thankyou Awake for all the interesting stuff about the Macy çonferences and the Double Bind/Game theory an all that.  

Ursus, Chuck worked for Douglas Aircraft ??  That's interesting.  In what capacity, if you know, please ??

[starry-eyed pirate]

...Yeah, it's takin, a while for all the pre-Synanon/cybernetics stuff to settle in on me.  I feel kinda-like a fool for bein so blown away, cause really this stuff is a pretty basic survival mechanism, that most folks develop to one degree or another, in their childhood or at least by their teens.  I mean the principle of manipulation.  The ability to manipulate others through your own clever behaviour.  The set up.

Yeah. It seems that most people have that ability.  They can be manipulative, so isn't all the game theory/cybernetics an' all just a scientific articulation of that process, I mean, extrapolated out to the social group ??

Yeah, and it is quite an impressive articulation, I should say.

And it's not even a big secret, it's right there for anyone to see if you only know where to look.  The mind blowing thing is the way the government infects the minds of it's citizens with the double bind and even keeps itself in power that way.  So it is really, all the program.  Pledging Allegiance and singing patriotic songs about the revolution in school.  Standing at attention before the flag...only to go to $tr8 and learn all this.  The government espouses the values of freedom and democracy, while simultaneously plotting to control every social response of it's citizens to a social environment they all but control.  As a society we're in Skinners box.

[starry-eyed pirate]

Doesn't game theory rely on ego driven response, self interest over the interests of others ??

[Froderik]

And it's not even a big secret, it's right there for anyone to see if you only know where to look.  The mind blowing thing is the way the government infects the minds of it's citizens with the double bind and even keeps itself in power that way.  So it is really, all the program.  Pledging Allegiance and singing patriotic songs about the revolution in school.  Standing at attention before the flag...only to go to $tr8 and learn all this.  The government espouses the values of freedom and democracy, while simultaneously plotting to control every social response of it's citizens to a social environment they all but control.  As a society we're in Skinners box.

Well said!

[Ursus]

Doesn't game theory rely on ego driven response, self interest over the interests of others ??

I'd say that's a pretty fair characterization.  

From what I've read, the "brains" at RAND would frequently test games on the secretaries ... with occasionally frustrating results. Namely, the secretaries would frequently agree beforehand to play cooperatively or to split the spoils of the outcome, despite whatever parameters said game had been set up to optimize. This could sometimes skew the outcome in unexpected ways.

[seamus]

kinda like how we get conditioned to respond to order, when chaos is probably a more natural state. Seems sometimes my childhood conditioned me to see everything as my fault, that I was weak, disobedient,bad stupid,never amount to shit. So some body later on when some of the tree they planted bore fruit,they could say see, I told ya so.....Everything is about breaking (or at least badly bending) your will.Thats the double bind im stuck in. When I think back on it str8 only gave one of my parents one more name to call me....druggie. I had a parent who spent 40 fucking years,trying to break my will,standing in oposition of every dream I ever had,and ultimately when that didnt work( other than robbin me of self esteem,and hope) they hired a subcontractor, str8. I struggle with this every goddamn day.When I should have been learnind how to live I was busy tryin to survive one lockup after another, in the brief periods when I wasnt all locked up I walked around fucking bewildered,and fairly certain that I had a sign on my forehead that read " just got out of bein in(inset facility here) and being behind the curve as far as any sort of real world skills to get me ahead. Always in remediation,playin fuckin catch up, and mostly failing miserably.
So now ,here I am ,lookin down the barrel of 50.....wonderin how in the fuck did I (a) live this long and (b) get so far behind.
  Any time somebody tries to help, I cant take it, im just to distrustful( cause I remember what that help thing REALLY means) I really wish I could never drink again. Prolly not gonna happen, I mean what,am I gonna go to AA? PFFFT... I can only sruggle thru any sort of "self help" thing with a pessimistic ,sceptical.....cant drink the cool-aid kind a point of view.

[Ursus]

And it's not even a big secret, it's right there for anyone to see if you only know where to look.  The mind blowing thing is the way the government infects the minds of it's citizens with the double bind and even keeps itself in power that way.  So it is really, all the program.  Pledging Allegiance and singing patriotic songs about the revolution in school.  Standing at attention before the flag...only to go to $tr8 and learn all this.  The government espouses the values of freedom and democracy, while simultaneously plotting to control every social response of it's citizens to a social environment they all but control.  As a society we're in Skinners box.

Well said!

And the source of some of Skinner's funding was, of course, governmental in origin. It's a closed loop.

Many prominent names were funded through The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology ["a C.I.A organization used to channel money for MK-ULTRA research"], including:[1] B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Carolyn and Musafer Sherif, Margaret Mead, Charles Osgood, Hans Eysenck, Martin Orne and Gregory Bateson.

Link[/list]

[starry-eyed pirate]

Doesn't game theory rely on ego driven response, self interest over the interests of others ??

I'd say that's a pretty fair characterization.  

Yeah, I guess that seems pretty obvious, but what I'm beginning to wonder about now is the relationship between the ego driven response required by game theory and the over-all state of our ego driven society.  I would like to study American society in the early 1900s and note the major social and cultural values and compare them to our own, with game theory in mind.

I've been reading up on RAND recently.

[starry-eyed pirate]

kinda like how we get conditioned to respond to order, when chaos is probably a more natural state. Seems sometimes my childhood conditioned me to see everything as my fault, that I was weak, disobedient,bad stupid,never amount to shit. So some body later on when some of the tree they planted bore fruit,they could say see, I told ya so.....Everything is about breaking (or at least badly bending) your will.Thats the double bind im stuck in. When I think back on it str8 only gave one of my parents one more name to call me....druggie. I had a parent who spent 40 fucking years,trying to break my will,standing in oposition of every dream I ever had,and ultimately when that didnt work( other than robbin me of self esteem,and hope) they hired a subcontractor, str8. I struggle with this every goddamn day.When I should have been learnind how to live I was busy tryin to survive one lockup after another, in the brief periods when I wasnt all locked up I walked around fucking bewildered,and fairly certain that I had a sign on my forehead that read " just got out of bein in(inset facility here) and being behind the curve as far as any sort of real world skills to get me ahead. Always in remediation,playin fuckin catch up, and mostly failing miserably.
So now ,here I am ,lookin down the barrel of 50.....wonderin how in the fuck did I (a) live this long and (b) get so far behind.
  Any time somebody tries to help, I cant take it, im just to distrustful( cause I remember what that help thing REALLY means) I really wish I could never drink again. Prolly not gonna happen, I mean what,am I gonna go to AA? PFFFT... I can only sruggle thru any sort of "self help" thing with a pessimistic ,sceptical.....cant drink the cool-aid kind a point of view.

Yeah, that sucks.  The only place I ever was kept in was $tr8... 'cep' a few weeks in the youth detention center...but I was in $tr8 a long time.

[starry-eyed pirate]

And it's not even a big secret, it's right there for anyone to see if you only know where to look.  The mind blowing thing is the way the government infects the minds of it's citizens with the double bind and even keeps itself in power that way.  So it is really, all the program.  Pledging Allegiance and singing patriotic songs about the revolution in school.  Standing at attention before the flag...only to go to $tr8 and learn all this.  The government espouses the values of freedom and democracy, while simultaneously plotting to control every social response of it's citizens to a social environment they all but control.  As a society we're in Skinners box.

Well said!

Thanks Fro  

[seamus]

I dont know if anyone is aware that B.F.Skinner also wrote a book  of fiction called "Walden Two" Ints about a fictional kind of utopic experimental community...I think it was written inthe 1940s...wait lemme go look(he shuffles off) yep the 40s,WELL worth the read..enough so that I wonder how fictional it is. Dont confuse this book with Therau either ,not the same thing at all...but btw his "civil disobedience" is worthwhile as well. I found my copy in a used bookstore in shitsville
Wisconsin...some years ago.

[Awake]

...Yeah, it's takin, a while for all the pre-Synanon/cybernetics stuff to settle in on me.  I feel kinda-like a fool for bein so blown away, cause really this stuff is a pretty basic survival mechanism, that most folks develop to one degree or another, in their childhood or at least by their teens.  I mean the principle of manipulation.  The ability to manipulate others through your own clever behaviour.  The set up.

Yeah. It seems that most people have that ability.  They can be manipulative, so isn't all the game theory/cybernetics an' all just a scientific articulation of that process, I mean, extrapolated out to the social group ??

Yeah, and it is quite an impressive articulation, I should say.

And it's not even a big secret, it's right there for anyone to see if you only know where to look.  The mind blowing thing is the way the government infects the minds of it's citizens with the double bind and even keeps itself in power that way.  So it is really, all the program.  Pledging Allegiance and singing patriotic songs about the revolution in school.  Standing at attention before the flag...only to go to $tr8 and learn all this.  The government espouses the values of freedom and democracy, while simultaneously plotting to control every social response of it's citizens to a social environment they all but control.  As a society we're in Skinners box.

I thought that was a right on interpretation there Pirate. At some level I wonder about the broader implications in society, but I think programs represent a level of control that crosses the line, and contributes to distorting our social definitions of values like ‘freedom’. I don’t know if anyone has been sucked into a multi-level marketing scheme, but  they are pyramid schemes that can’t really work. If you buy into the business it is organized so that you make money off of the sales of the people you have recruited under you in your downline. These mlms will claim that they are selling a product, but it is made obvious that the only way to really make money is to not sell the product, but the business . So it is the structure of the system that takes advantage of peoples self serving behavior, and that means no one is going to waste their time trying to do anything but recruit more people and maintain their downline with constant e-mails and calls, because everyone has to maintain a certain amount of sales or they don’t maintain their place in the hierarchy.

At some level I guess I can see how these bs organizations are allowed to legally operate. Maybe, (big maybe), since you have to sign on the dotted line, and if you aren’t smart enough to figure it out then I guess it’s legitimate for a business to take advantage of them. What I CAN’T see as being legitimate is this type of design for use in ‘therapy’ systems in programs, let alone for use on adolescents who are forced to participate, without consent, in a process that is meant to decieve them into deceiving each other . I just find this to be so blatantly in contradiction of America’s espoused values of freedom, democracy, individualism, the ‘self-made man, the ‘American Dream’ etc. that crossing this particular line exposes the two faced politics at play.

And the source of some of Skinner's funding was, of course, governmental in origin. It's a closed loop.

Many prominent names were funded through The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology ["a C.I.A organization used to channel money for MK-ULTRA research"], including:[1] B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Carolyn and Musafer Sherif, Margaret Mead, Charles Osgood, Hans Eysenck, Martin Orne and Gregory Bateson.

Link[/list]

Relatedly, Ursus just named somebody, Carl Rogers, who sort of exemplifies that kind of two faced politics. This article “Carl Rogers and the CIA” http://jhp.sagepub.com/content/48/1/6.abstract  has been an intriguing read into Carl Roger’s involvement in MK-ULTRA, which ironically took place at the same time as he was advancing the new field of humanistic Psychiatry, which comes from an  individual, existential, and spiritual perspective. I won’t go too detailed into it but some things that were interesting to me were that the CIA funded Rogers to do research projects specifically into “the correlation of psychological and physiological variables in personality and personality change” and “personality change in psychotherapy for schizophrenics”. The article makes the suggestion that the CIA may have been interested in Rogers’ work on schizophrenics because the defensive, withdrawn schizophrenic is similar to a prisoner of war and an interrogator, and so the method of coercing compliance is similar.

It is pretty interesting, with some very important connective history and names, but the article is admittedly speculating on what he could have been working on, and I think there is probably more not being considered. This comes from the journal of humanistic psychology after all.

[Inculcated]

This thread is developing interestingly, I’m enjoying the read.
MKULTRA connections abound and good links all around…
Here’s more on the topic Carl Rogers and encounters and more:

In 1965, Rogers wrote that his first involvement with encounter groups was “an intensive post-doctoral workshop in psychotherapy in 1950.” In Carl Rogers on Encounter Groups, he moved the date back to when the encounter group was first conceived in the aftermath of World War II. During the years 1946 and ‘47, Rogers and his associates at the Counseling Center of the University of Chicago were involved in training counselors for the Veterans Administration, when he was asked to come up with a psychological training mechanism which would help these counselors reintegrate soldiers, returning from the war into civilian life. http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/rogers.html

It wasn't all bad. The enlightenment apparently turned some Jesuit gals into sapphic love nuns while he was at it....Hmmm, wonder if the monsignor ever read ‘bout that

Carl Rogers used the basic encounter group as an instrument for self-directed change in Immaculate Heart school system in Los Angeles.  Dr. William Coulson overseeing this project stated that the project “simply fortifies the staffs’ willingness to run risks.  The individual is strengthened in encounter groups.  He learns to trust his experience.”  He saw the encounter group “as a medium of harnessing the energy of the student revolutionary.”  Today those schools do not exist.  The school disintegrated under the watchful eye of Rogers and Coulson.  Both discovered a “pattern of failure” with the group encounter process.  Rogers saw it as a pattern hard to overcome, traditional minds tended to prevail in society despite the pressure to change, while Coulson saw the process itself as a failure.  Coulson continues to sound the warning today.http://authorityresearch.com/1998-06%20 ... 0BSTEP.htm

Although he says he would have nothing to do with secret Agency activities today, he asks for understanding in light of the climate of the 1950s. "We really did regard Russia as the enemy," declares Rogers, "and we were trying to do various things to make sure the Russians did not get the upper hand." Rogers received an important professional reward for joining the Society [for the Investigation of Human Ecology, later called the Human Ecology Fund] board. Executive Director James Monroe had let him know that, once he agreed to serve, he could expect to receive a Society grant. "That appealed to me because I was having trouble getting funded," says Rogers. "Having gotten that grant [about $30,000 over three years], it made it possible to get other grants from Rockefeller and NIMH." Rogers still feels grateful to the Society for helping him establish a funding "track record," but he emphasizes that the Agency [CIA] never had any effect on his research (brackets mine). http://www.miraclestudies.net/BillCIA

And yes, these particular links have been specifically selected both for their informative relevance to the discussion and for my own amusement.

[heretik]

Incucated,
Thanks for the additional information. On the topic of amusement, I would suppose it is ones own responsibility to take care of their amusement.

[starry-eyed pirate]

...Yeah, it's takin, a while for all the pre-Synanon/cybernetics stuff to settle in on me.  I feel kinda-like a fool for bein so blown away, cause really this stuff is a pretty basic survival mechanism, that most folks develop to one degree or another, in their childhood or at least by their teens.  I mean the principle of manipulation.  The ability to manipulate others through your own clever behaviour.  The set up.

Yeah. It seems that most people have that ability.  They can be manipulative, so isn't all the game theory/cybernetics an' all just a scientific articulation of that process, I mean, extrapolated out to the social group ?

Of course, the double bind method of mind control is a particular form of manipulation, with a scientific structure and a specific approach, not just any ol carrot and a stick, so the above is an overgeneralization and not completely right.

And it's not even a big secret, it's right there for anyone to see if you only know where to look.  The mind blowing thing is the way the government infects the minds of it's citizens with the double bind and even keeps itself in power that way.  So it is really, all the program.  Pledging Allegiance and singing patriotic songs about the revolution in school.  Standing at attention before the flag...only to go to $tr8 and learn all this.  The government espouses the values of freedom and democracy, while simultaneously plotting to control every social response of it's citizens to a social environment they all but control.  As a society we're in Skinners box.

This aint completely right either, but as American values expand into the world so does the program.  The media carries it, the global market carries it...the people who wanta "make a difference" carry it   , like a disease....

...but they don't really control the environment completely, yet, either.  There are still places you can escape to and likely always will be, but it is always a battle between the forces that exist within the American social dynamic, and they want slaves.  Rand Corporation and all them.  The U.S. government.    

Anyway...I'm gonna make a T-shirt that says: "Game Theory Test Subject"... :rofl: