Quote of the week from Tyler Cowen.
I’ve been an economist for so long that I don’t flinch when the paper abstract starts as follows:
“This paper models love-making as a signaling game. In the act of love-making, man and woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy. Each has a prior belief about the other’s state of ecstasy. These prior beliefs are associated with the other’s sexual response capacity…”
Gag. In the same spirit as “Fooling the Shrinks,” couldn’t we give homeless psychotics jobs writing scholarly papers on sex and see who notices?
I had the opposite reaction (maybe I’ve been hanging around with economists too long). I imagine that the paper is at least in part an exercise in droll humour (‘pince-sans-rire’ as the French say), and wanted to buy the author a pint for pulling it off so well. I’ve always been keen on the use of game theory for intellectually subversive and/or artistic purposes; I reckon that if Alfred Jarry or the old Oulipo crowd were around today, they’d be pulling off outrages like this paper left, right and center.
That’s economics-speak? Really? I would have thought it was some other kind of speak - semiotics or something. Clearly I don’t read nearly enough game theory.
Henry, attitude makes all the difference. When I re-read it with the expectation that it’s a joke, it was much more entertaining.
Game theorists really like to talk about signalling. Semioticians can probably tell us more interesting and useful things about non-overt human communication, but they won’t be able to model it. No great loss, if you ask me….
This paper models X lulls you into a receptive frame of mind, the proscenium arch of the rigorous imagination. The rest, love-making as a signaling game, is utterly familiar to those of us old enough to have been surfeited with psychoanalytic suggestiveness.
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