Thinking About the Crypto Unthinkable
On Sunday, August 26, 2001, at 07:15 PM, Faustine wrote:
Tim wrote: On Saturday, August 25, 2001, at 02:46 PM, Faustine wrote:
...But the ones I really admire are the mathematician-analysts, the hard- science analysts: they tend not to hog the limelight like some of their more voluble counterparts, but their influence is still enormous.
I'd be interesting in hearing whom you think are good examples.
Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, John Nash. You already mentioned von Neumann, he was the first to come to mind.
Yes, we talk about these guys here. I read "On Thermonuclear War" in the 60s (well, I skimmed most of the "escalation ladder" details). Schelling points figure heavily into many of our analyses, and Nash equilbria are just that... (BTW, there's at least one good book describing Nash's swerve into insanity and his road back.) This said, I wouldn't advise _anyone_ to study "policy" (or its earlier incarnations, "Operations Research." "Systems Analysis," or the utterly execrable "General Systems," a la Bertanlanffy). Guys like Kahn and Schelling and Nash were mathematicians who happened to be in on the founding of a hot field in the 50s: game theory. Von Neumann and Morgenstern actually founded it, but the heyday was when RAND, Hudson, etc. were doing studies of nuclear war, disarmament, games of chicken, and so on. This has all been pretty much explored now, and these think tanks are pale imitations of their former selves. Certainly they contribute very little to "policy" of the sort of interest to us. (There may be applications...as we have talked about for many years. See the archives, searching on "game theory." However, this will come from someone versed in various kinds of game theory approaches who turns his gaze to crypto games. Likely to come from a mathematically-inclined person, unlikely to come from a sociology/poli sci/policy grad student.) If there are Herman Kahns out there, thinking about the crypto unthinkable, they are probably us. Not to put too fine a point on it.
Given that most all the people on your list and mine are precisely what the author was driving at, I think the "Super Analyst" approach is certainly worth aspiring to. And as far as I've been able to tell, policy analysis PhD programs offer the most flexible way to pursue a multidisciplinary, scientific approach while striking a good balance between the theoretical and the practical.
Well, good luck. I disagree. I can't see someone coming out of a Ph.D. program in "super analysis" being magically endowed with the skills to influence policy. An obvious point that perhaps needs to be emphasized: all of those scientist-policy wonks we have discussed were first and foremost brilliant scientists. Their discoveries gave them cachet, not a major in "general analysis." Do the math, so to speak. --Tim May
At 08:11 PM 08/26/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:
This said, I wouldn't advise _anyone_ to study "policy" (or its earlier incarnations, "Operations Research." "Systems Analysis," or the utterly execrable "General Systems," a la Bertanlanffy).
Hey, I resemble that remark (Undergrad and Master's degree on Operations Research.) Cool subset of applied mathematics - it touches on enough different fields, including the algorithm-analysis stuff that overlaps computer science and complexity theory, probability and statistics, simulation, scheduling, inventory theory, graph theory, measure theory, abstract stuff like matroids. Good for looking at systems design, and it worked well for me, though you risk being too generalist and not specific enough at anything. Unfortunately the whole field of Linear Programming changed just about the time I left college :-), with Karmarkar's work showing that LP could be done in polynomial time (though with a big ugly constant multiplier that means that the theoretically-exponential Simplex algorithm tends to converge faster.) There was work from operations research that was on the rather bogus side, like the stuff that encouraged development of square pineapples because the cans fit tighter on shelves than round ones....
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Tim May