MU-6: Human Behavior and the Maths Connection

This blog, while part of the “MU” (Mathematical Universe) series, is far more narrow in scope: it’s about humans and their behavioral patterns. And the maths connection to all that, of course.

Have you heard of Bayes Theorem? Probably not. Here’s what the theorem does: let’s say you’ve assigned a certain probability to the occurrence of some event (let’s call it the “original event”). Later, you learn of some new piece of information related to the above. By how much should you adjust your probability of the original event based on this new information? That’s the question that Bayes Theorem answers, via equations, of course. (We need such equations because the adjustment we should be making is very unintuitive).

Kareem Amin makes the amusing point that the maths of Bayes Theorem explains why it is pointless to argue with fundamentalists:

“By definition, fundamentalists have an initial confidence in their beliefs (or their hypotheses about certain aspects of the world) that is very close to certainty…Evidence in the form of events and arguments has almost no power to alter the confidence of a fundamentalist, according to BT.”

All of us knew that already: and now we have mathematical proof for the same!

When the Americans and the Soviets got their nukes in the 1950’s, both sides were terrified: would the other side launch theirs first? Enter game theory, a branch of maths that evaluates different options when there is no one right answer; and your choice depends on the choices your opponent might make. Game theorist John von Neumann helped define the Pentagon’s nukes strategy, says Geoffrey Miller:

“He developed the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), based on concepts of rational deterrence and the Nash equilibrium. By the time he died in 1957, he’d taught the Pentagon policy-makers that if the U.S. and the Soviet Union could utterly destroy each other even after one launched a nuclear first strike, there could be no rational incentive for nuclear war.”

It isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say:

“The new field of game theory had already provoked several re-thinks about nuclear policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and that’s what saved us.”

The reason this strategy doesn’t work against Islamic terrorism is easy to see: it assumes that the other side is rational and wants to live, that the other side isn’t suicidal. Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, want to die.

Was one of my friends right when  he said that we just need to devise the right maths theory, the equivalent of what von Neumann did with game theory, to deal with the al-Qaeda’s, LeT’s and ISIS’s of the world?