Game Theory Gaslighting: Abundance Year Episode 1917

Full Metal Ox Day 1851
Wednesday 25, March 2026
Abundance Year Episode 1916
Noxsoma Life Camp:
Game Theory Gaslighting

Passion
Dharma Football
Throwing your dharma football into the future, and catching it.

Today's Episode: https://odysee.com/@Noxsoma:2/1851_full_3-25-26_1916_football:0?r=47k2ScJsm9Uex9eETqgCCA8q1fukdST9

Game Theory Gaslighting

Humans are obsessed with knowing the future. Why is this? So they won’t have to toil in the mud and factories or in cubicles to, “earn a living.” Like anything in this Simulatrix, it’s all about the Benjamins. “If you die before me, send me down, or in your case, up, some winning lottery numbers.” Some people use dreams to choose lottery numbers, some use the Bible Code to predict the stock market, some use psychics to decide where and when to gamble. (Roulette, or craps?) And some use “Game Theory.”

There’s this guy out there who uses game theory to teach history, or some such. I’ve seen him interviewed a few times. Can’t take him. In the opinion of your humble vagabond, he’s more show than go. He’s the PT Barnum of Game Theory. Because game-theory is a “theory,” it can and is often adjusted, or the model is “expanded” and “extended” to accommodate heretofore “unforeseen” developments. The infamous, “unknown, unknowns.”

It’s easy to apply game theory to past events because we already know the accepted outcome. We “know” who the bad guys were, or do we? We are born into a narrative that keeps being updated. The body-count rises every time the story is told by a new generation. The hero is stronger, the odds are greater. The chessboard is fixed. There are no wild cards in the deck. So yeah. In 20 20 hindsight, “I knew I shouldn’t have traded my health for a burger & fries, and a Tab or Coke on the side. We can retroactively “game-theory” Event 201, in 2026, but that’s not going to undo the damage.

The cats who are playing game-theory with the Israelius war against Iran, are literally not playing with a full deck. They don’t have the intel, just speculation. They don’t know the plan and most importantly, they don’t know the game.

Sure, the name of the game is “War!” But what’s the objective? Is it a zero-sum game? Is it all or nothing? And what about the Beaver? What exactly are the stakes? Who are the real stake-holders? Stick that in your AI and let it stew for a while.

With all the performances by these clairvoyant circus acts and sideshow trixters, your humble curmudgeon decided to look into the origins of, you guessed it. Game theory.

But first. All this Sideshow-Bob stuff, is why I call this episode Game Theory Gaslighting. I didn’t have enough space for the full title, so I truncated it. Is the past tense of gaslight, (thanks again to psychology for resurrecting this film/word out of obscurity), gaslit? Or gaslighted?

Your boy was under the impression that game theory emerged out of chess. But once again, we were wrong. The game was poker.

The origins of modern game theory are primarily credited to the mathematician John von Neumann, who established it as a rigorous mathematical field. While strategic thinking in games had been explored for centuries, von Neumann's 1928 paper, "On the Theory of Games of Strategy", is recognized as the foundational work. In this paper, he proved the “minimax theorem”, which states that in two-person zero-sum games, (where one player's gain is the other's loss), there is always a rational strategy for both players that minimizes their potential maximum loss. This is the “Duh!” moment here. Of course, there might also be an “irrational” strategy that guarantees the other player’s loss. However, as mentioned in today’s episode, the game is controlled, which reduces these lofty hypotheses to little more than guesses.

Interestingly, the game that inspired this breakthrough was poker. Von Neumann was fascinated by the element of "bluffing", which, psychologically speaking can be called, “gaslighting,” or in the lingo of the profane, “lying.” The element of deception provides a feature of imperfect information that distinguishes poker from purely logical games like chess, and aligns it closer to real life. The bluffing element showed that an optimal strategy must be unpredictable, mixing moves randomly to avoid being exploited. To complicate the strategy further, there are several variations of poker, which make bluffing trickier, especially if any of your opponents are nerdy enough to count cards.

But let’s get back to this mathematical science and the new field of study it launched.

Von Neumann might have continued fantasizing about how pokers players deceived and exploited each other if not for the collaboration with . Indeed it wasn’t until the collaboration with economist Oskar Morgenstern. With the 1944 publication of “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” a new field of study was launched.

What does this tell us? Did you notice the pattern re-emerge. “Economic.” That’s money. “Behavior.” That’s how humans spend their money. Just a quick note, “cognitive dissonance” is also about how humans spend their money. It all comes back to socio-economic behavior with these people. This book extended von Neumann's initial ideas to encompass cooperative games involving multiple players and applied them to economic and social behavior.

Once again, it boomerangs back to controlling the herd.

And now, or since, game theory has been utilized to “predict,” (you know the way the THEY predict events. By manipulating and controlling them), political campaigns, military campaigns, and with the advent of computer modeling, everything from demographic lifestyle patterns, certainly buying habits, but also health habits, trends, commercial advertising campaigns and even who would be the most likely to trade their future health for a happy meal.

Your caustic curmudgeon’s complaint is not with game theory itself. It’s the way that it was hijacked. It was expanded and applied to “real life.” And it really doesn’t work in real life. They will tell you it works. For example, the 2004 election campaign. The illusion of choice between two “Bones-men” candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry. Both members of Yale’s infamous “secret society” (allegedly). If a win for America was a change in foreign policy, (i.e. get US troops out of Afghanistan), than the country didn’t stand a chance. Game theory strategy. Cheat. Staff the the opposing little league team with “ringers,” so the challengers don’t stand a chance.

I wonder if any of these stand-up game philosophers teach this element of the theory. I wanted to call it “chaos theory,” but that’s taken. Maybe it’s “impunity theory.” When a relatively small cabal of power-hungry psychopaths are enabled to act with impunity for their own self-interests without regard to rules, strategy, or the consequences of loss.

When game-theory leaves the theoretical space and enters ruthless reality, all bets are off. If there’s no rules-based anything to the game anymore, why bother to play? But if you do.

Always bet on Orange.

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