I’ve been disappointed by how little game theory there has been in this class
Hi everyone! I should make clear at the outset that I am not posting this out of hatred for Jiang. I think his broader project- a highly opinionated, highly bold reading of history used to make bold and testable predictions about the future- is quite interesting. I really liked his geo-strategy class in particular, and his civilization series was also very interesting. I found myself disagreeing with far more of the material in the secret history class for reasons I imagine should be obvious; the grandiosity of his claims about *the past* in my opinion were not justified by the weight of the evidence. However, I could still appreciate the fact that however much I disagreed with him on everything, he was still providing new material in that class, and seemed to have his material in order well in advance. Plus, his theories are entertaining on their own, which kept me watching.
This brings me to his latest class. There is an obvious elephant in the room here: there is no game theory in this class. I didn’t think this was going to be the case initially; the first class seemed to gesture in the direction that game theory would be the subject that would be talked about. However, as time went on, it seemed clear that Jiang was more interested in commenting on world events than he was in providing a ground-up overview of game theory, and *then* applying what we’ve learned to world events.
If anyone doubts the poverty of an education in game theory this class has provided, then try to answer this question using what Jiang has lectured on: what is Nash equilibrium? Or, how about: what is Pareto optimality? I can’t say for certain that Jiang never defines these terms, I haven’t watched every episode of the series, but I don’t think I’ve heard these concepts referred to or described in detail, in the way any real class on game theory would. The limit of Jiang’s interaction with game theory within the class seems to be looking at different political entities and attempting to figure out where their incentives overlap.
There are more rigorous attempts to use game theory to predict historical events, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is the most famous figure in this regard. However, when BBDM analyzes politics, he is highly skeptical of analyses which attempt to treat states as having a unified interest- instead, he tries to break them down into components and figure out what each *person* wants within each political entity (more specifically, what would result in each person in power keeping or losing their power), and then analyze what influence they have, and only then make a prediction. The broader point is, you need to have a very good idea of who your players are before you can start constructing a game. This is painstaking, highly technical work that could never be done on a blackboard.
I don’t expect Jiang to be able to match the depth and rigor of someone like Bueno de Mesquita, but I did expect that his approach would be cut from a similar cloth. But I’ve seen no evidence of that, and it’s disappointing to me.