Rock Breaks Scissors:

Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

William Poundstone (2014; Little, Brown and Company)

       We hear a lot these days about algorithms behind the scenes of our digital lives: the minute we shop or browse for news online, Big Data draws a bead on us. Research shows that it would take a great deal of effort not to be predictable in this way; in fact, we probably couldn't achieve it if we tried.  This is not just true of my taste in L.L. Bean sweaters - and what I might be willing to pay for them - but all the way down to the smallest atoms of choice, like a friendly game of Rock, Paper, Scissors over a bar tab. (Not always so friendly: did you know that there are international tournaments of RPS?)

 

      There's actually a game one step more primitive than that, in which two players make individual choices, such as heads or tails on a penny they hold, and award the win to either matching coins, for one player, or non-matching coins for the other. Any binary will do: odds and evens, or yeses and noes. When playing against a machine, the ideal would be to play a random sequence of guesses, and avoid falling into predictable patterns. 

 

      Practically nobody can do this; our vision of randomness turns out to be guessable by the most primitive machines. Back in the fifties, a couple of the masterminds at Bell Labs built such machines; Claude Shannon's had sixteen bits of memory, fewer than you have in your fingers and toes. "A stream of brilliant and egotistical scientists, engineers, and mathematicians passed through Bell Labs in the 1950's. Shannons' outguessing machine was the sword in the stone. Anyone with pretensions to being smart could hardly leave without matching his genius against it. Few could resist the challenge, and few left without sacrificing a bit of ego." Shannon himself, naturally, had the only consistent winning record. 

 

      Poundstone's book looks into research on the prediction problems we encounter in everyday life: multiple choice tests, March Madness brackets, or tennis serves; and some that are rare but consequential: picking unguessable passwords, or offering the right price on a house. His advice won't make you unbeatable, but these are cases where moving the odds a little bit is at least pleasing, and possibly profitable. 

 

      Some of the advice amounts to: be humble. You're human, so your intuition about what randomness looks like is probably terrible. Your intuitions about football betting, in a point-spread tournament, are probably so bad that you'd win just as often betting the opposite of your preferred card, because if your contrarian Evil Twin wins, there are probably no other bets like that to split the pot with. 

 

       The stock market is the classic case of needing to outwit other humans as ill-informed as you are. Poundstone's long term investment strategy, based on a ten-year trailing average of price-to-earnings ratios, is the polar opposite of day trading. It's austere in the extreme, but he's probably right. 

 

      Even if you have no skin in such games, Rock Breaks Scissors is an invigorating book. The writing is clean and clear, and Poundstone follows the questions he raises to a reasonable depth. And his goal is salutary: "To understand the misperception of randomness is to gain power, not over fate but over ourselves. Fortuna keeps spinning her wheel, and no one gets out of the game."

Any Good Books, April 1, 2021 by email.

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

James Alan McPherson (2000, Touchstone)

       The essays of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) that are collected here were written near the end of his distinguished career as a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher. They offer glimpses of his life as a student, a father, and an observer of American culture and history. His range is impressive, not to say intimidating: he's also capable of reckoning with what ancient Rome, Shakespeare, and modern Japan might have to say to us.

      The exile of the subtitle refers to the fact that, beginning in 1981, he made his home in Iowa City, where he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; that's a long way from his childhood: "I lived in a lower-class black community in Savannah, Georgia, attended segregated public schools, and knew no white people socially. I can't remember thinking of this last fact as a disadvantage, but I do know that early on I was being conditioned to believe that I was not supposed to know any white people on social terms." As fate would have it, he became a reader, and then a student at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. At Harvard Law School, he studied fiction writing on the side, and followed up with an MFA from the Iowa workshop, having already been published by the Atlantic Monthly.

      Iowa may be one of the whitest places there is; what McPherson liked about it was that it was self-consciously a place with customs and rituals, a sense of the Done Thing. He went so far as to pose as a sports fan, in concert with the prevailing ethos. "...I was sure to find all the butchers watching a game on television. They had already assumed that I was an athlete because all the black males they noticed were athletes. I did not disappoint them." But of course, there's much more going on with him than that. It's just that you can't get close enough to people to figure out their real stories without making some gesture of community.

       McPherson's own community included Ralph Ellison, whom he appreciates here both as a hero and as a friend, in an essay responding to the publication of Ellison's Juneteenth. Ellison, McPherson says, brought to the modernist project a blues sensibility, capable of mingling the inescapable strife of daily life with a streak of humor, and of personal style. After all, among the ancient Greeks, "life was tragic, full of agon. But to them it was also comic. And the two dramatic categories were linked."

       They're linked in Huckleberry Finn, certainly. In an essay occasioned by the restoration of some passages of the book that had been cut, McPherson observes that Mark Twain "was writing about the possibility of friendships across racial lines, at a time when such emotional connections were considered radical. He was writing about the struggles of the human heart confined to the structure of white supremacy...yet Twain, like Stephen Crane after him, still wrestled with the possibilities of heroic action within the confines of a corrupt uncaring culture."

       Such matters are in McPherson's purview as well, particularly when he reads Othello in the shadow of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, which were recent history at the time. The outlines of our life today were clear to him already: "Prosperity has been polarized, with great wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The institution of the nation-state is rapidly being replaced by global corporate ties under invisible managements. The middle class is frightened. The poor no longer exist as human beings. Europe is becoming one federated nation, while the demographics of the United States are changing relentlessly. Information is everywhere, but there is less and less of it with any substance."

      That's the world we still live in, and we can't say nobody saw it coming.

 

Emailed as  Any Good Books, March 1, 2021