2017년 6월 29일 목요일

Dic/ tant (introduisant une proposition causale ou justification)

I. Adv. > A.

3. [Tant introd. une prop. à valeur causale ou justificative]

a) [La sub. causale peut se trouver à différents endroits de la phrase]

─[En seconde place, après l'énoncé de l'effet]

  • Elle n'osait pas pleurer, tant elle avait peur de la Thénardier.
  • J'eus de la peine à le reconnâitre tant avait maigri son grand corps, déjà mince et frêle naguère.
─[En tête de phrase]
  • Tant est efficace le secours de l'insulte à ce qui vous domine le mieux, et grand le plaisir de fronder un mâitre : « Je mourrai peut-être de toi, mais crois bien que j'y mettrai le plus de temps possible... »
─[Enchâssée dans la princ.]
  • Les pots d'argile se cassaient sur les dalles, les serpents couraient, semblaient pulluler, et, tant ils étaient nombreux, sortir des murs naturellement.
  • La robe doit sortir, tant elle a de cachet, d'un atelier de fée.

b) [Introd. une vérité d'ordre générale en justification de ce qui vient d'être dit]

Tant il est vrai que :
  • Ces quinze jours sont plus distincts dans ma mémoire que les trois années qui venaient de s'écouler, et même peut-être que les trois années qui suivirent et qu'elle passa encore avec moi. Tant il est vrai que la douleur seule marque dans l'enfance le sentiment de la vie.
  • Dans une anthologie érotique où sont représentés plusieurs écrivains connus, il n'y a que Collete qui ait fourni une page lisible, tant il est vrai que ce sujet si riche et si grave, l'amour physique, n'inspire en général que des pauvretés.


Dic/ Accorder qch à qqn/qch, s'accorder


B. [Le comp d'obj désigne un ou plusieurs inanimés]

B.1. Mettre en harmonie des choses éventuellement ou effectivement opposées.
─ Accorder + obj au plur.
─ Accorder qqc et qqc
─ Accorder qqc avec qqc
─ Accorder qqc à qqc

B.2. Accorder qqc à qqn: se déclarer d'accord avec qqn en allant au-devant de ses désirs, de son attente.

a) [L'obj désigne un don] Concéder par faveur ou privlège, octroyer

  • Ah! pour aujourd'hui vous allez m'accorder cette faveur, mon cher coeur, dit M. Renaud en s'avançant vers sa femme - Vous êtes trop aimable pour vous refuser, joli cavalier, répondit-elle du même ton.

II. S'accorder
A. être ou se mettre en harmonie.
  • Je pars d'ici après-demain et je me décide à ne pas retouner à Genève, d'abord parce que je ne me sens pas la force de dire adieu à mon père, et parce que l'on s'accorde à dire que la route de Pontarlier est la moins mauvaise.
─s'accorder à/avec
  • Permettez-moi de vous le dire avec la simplicité d'un homme de mon âge, qui n'a que de la sympathie pour un jeune confrère bien doué, ardent au bien, et d'une ambition légitime. Depuis quelque temps, mon cher Pernichon, je déplore certaines imprudences, d'ailleurs vénielles - disons certaines démarches imprudentes - qui s'accordent mal avec ce que nous savions de vous, de votre modération, de votre tenus, de votre précoce maturité.

2017년 6월 23일 금요일

[발췌] Bentham's dead body

※ 발췌 (excerpts): 

출처 1: Jeremy Bentham Died in 1832, But He's Still Sitting in this University Hallway (Slate, Oct 2012)

Jeremy Bentham has been sitting in a corridor at University College of London since 1850.

The moral philosopher, whose advocacy of animal welfare, prison reform, universal suffrage, and gay rights was far ahead of his time, left a will with specific instructions on the treatment of his corpse. In it, he decreed that his skeleton and mummified head be assembled, clad in a black suit and seated upright on a chair in a wooden cabinet, under a placard reading "Auto Icon." He also suggested that his corpse could preside over regular meetings of his utlilitarian followers.

Bentham's plans for his remains became something of an obsession. For 10 years prior to his death, he reportedly carried a pair of glass eyes in his pocket so that embalmers could easily implant them into his head. Unfortunately, when the time came, something went wrong in the preservation process. Bentham's head took on a mottled, hollow-cheeked look, its leathery skin sagging under a pair of intensely blue glass eyes. Preservers created a wax head and screwed it onto the skeleton to ensure a more visually pleasing display, placing the real head between Bentham's feet.

The head sat undisturbed until 1975, when a group of mischievous students kidnapped it and demanded a £100 ransom be donated to charity. The university made a counter-offer of £10, and the students caved, returning Bentham's head to its rightful place. After a few more pranks, including one in which the skull was apparently used as a football, university administrators decidedto remove the head from public display. It now sits in the Conservation Safe in the Institute of Archaeology and is removed only for special occasions.


출처 2: Why is the stuffed corpse of a great philosopher at University Gollege of London?

( ... ... ) Bentham specified that his body be used as much as possible. This included an illegal educational dissection─since it was only officially legal to dissect executed prisoners. He also wanted it displayed as a monument to his beliefs, and since by that time he had become an icon, people agreed. His internal organs were removed, as was his head. His body was stuffed with lavender, straw, wool, and cotton. His head was meant to go back on his body, but attempts at mummification, while effective in mummifying the flesh, made it look too gruesome. He was dressed, his head replaced with a wax replica, and he was ready to go.

He was kept by a fellow utilitarian for 18 years, before University College of London, the college he help found, acquired him. The body was on public display, and the head on a somewhat more private display for over a hundred years. Over time, both body and head were swiped as pranks so frequently that at last the college put the head in a safe and made the body only viewable on specific days or by special appointment. That would undoubtedly have disappointed Bentham, but we have to be practical. And they still get some use out of him. It's said that at special meeting of the college council, the body is wheeled in and recorded as "Jeremy Bentham: present, but not voting." ( ... )


출처 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham#Death_and_the_auto-icon

( ... ... ) As early as 1769, when Bentham was 21 years old, he made a will leaving his body for dissection to a family friend, the physician and chemist George Fordyce, whose daughter, Maria Sophia, married Jeremy's brother Samuel Bentham. A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.

( ... ... ) Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith, it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as "present but not voting".


출처 4: http://www.christianreview.com.au/sub_read.html?uid=5032&section=sc40&section2=

( ... ... ) 여기까지는 특이한 사항이 별로 없습니다. 큰 뜻을 품고 대학을 세운 사람도 많고, 대학에 재산을 헌납한 사람도 많으니까요. 그런데 벤담의 유언에는 아주 유별난 한 가지 조건이 붙어있었습니다. 곧, 자신이 죽은 후 시신을 해부하여 유골에 밀랍을 씌우고 옷을 입혀서 대학교의 회의실에 안치할 것이며, 대학교는 이사회를 진행할 때에 자신의 시신을 출석시키고, 또한 사회자는 회원 점명 시에, “제레미 벤담, 출석하였으나 투표는 하지 않음!”(“Jeremy Bentham, present but not voting!”)이라고 자신을 호명하도록 하라는 것이 그 조건이었습니다.

벤담이 사망한지 18년 후인 1850년, 런던대학교는 그의 유언에 따라 그의 유골을 대학교 내에 안치하였고, 대학교의 설립 100주년과 150주년, 그리고 2013년에 벤담의 유골을 이사회에 출석시켜 그의 유언대로 이행하였습니다. 그리고 그의 유골은 현재까지도 런던대학교 건물 내에 안치되어 일반에게 공개되고 있습니다. ( ... ... )


출처 5: The Strange After-Life of Jeremy Bentham (Oddly Historical, Feb 2014)

( ... ... ) Bentham’s will contained a stipulation that, upon his death which came in 1832 at the age of 84, his body was to be dissected and his head removed. Then the flesh was to be stripped from his bones. The bones were to be dressed in his usual attire, which would be stuffed with straw to give the appearance of life. His head, meanwhile, was to be mummified and then set atop his preserved remains. The entire mummy was then to be seated in a glass and wood case called an auto-icon (apparently people in olden times had a thing for displaying dead bodies.)


Originally, one of Bentham’s disciples, a man named Thomas Southwood Smith, owned the auto-icon. The University College of London acquired it in 1850. For the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, the auto-icon was brought out for the meeting of the College Council. Jeremy Bentham was listed as “present, but not voting.”

( ... ... ) As for why Bentham had his body preserved in such an odd manner, no one is quite certain. It might have been a sort of prank, a flouting of the traditional beliefs surrounding death. It could have been due to an inflated sense of self importance. Or maybe it was a result of the age old impulse to preserve one’s legacy. No one knows for sure, but Jeremy Bentham and his Auto-Icon remain as a strange and macabre testament to a man and the philosophy he founded.


출처 6: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2013/07/12/bentham-present-but-not-voting/


출처 7: http://www.critical-theory.com/jeremy-benthams-preserved-corpse-haunt-nightmares/

2017년 6월 21일 수요일

Dic: 용어/ incentive aligning


─ 용례: incentive aligning, incentive alignment ...

─ 관련 (대구를 이루는) 용례: misaligned incentives, perverse incentives

─ 예문:

  • A supply chain works well if its companies' incentives are aligned─that is, if the risk, costs, and rewards of doing business are distributed fairly across the network. For reasons that we shall later discuss, if incentives aren't in line, the companies' actions won't optimize the chain's performance. ( ... )
  • Even with the best intentions and highest moral standards, true incentive alignment which rewards only behaviors that positivesly affects all stakeholders can be very difficult to achieve. In his famed scholarly article, "On the Folly of Rewarding A While Hoping for B" published in 1975, Steven Kerr of Ohio State Univ. delved into the topic and provided several examples of misaligned incentives: ( ... ) 
  • ( ... ) This problem of ensuring that people have the impetus to do what others are counting on them to do─in economese, that's aligning incentives─has become central over the last one hundred years as companies have grown dramatically in scale. That's what the corporate governance scandal of the early 20001 (Enron and Worldcom) were about, ( ... ... ) The Wells Fargo scandal of 2016 provides yet another example of misaligned incentives with large societal costs. ( ... ... ) Agency theory is the part of finance about the ways we can solve that underlying problem of misaligned incentives.



Song/ 당신도 울고 있네요 (김종찬, 1988)





 - 김종찬:



 - 강지민:


2017년 6월 19일 월요일

Dic: expression/ “obscurely wise, and coarsely kind”



It's a very warm and kind description of a man by Samuel Johnson. Obscure means not clear, and implies confused, unwise. But the man in question is wise in an obscure way. Coarse means someone who talks and behaves in a rude and offensive way, so implies vulgar and crude. But the man in question is kind in a coarse way. Yes, I know some individuals have such a quality.

According to a book, Samuel Johnson employed that expression to describe Robert Levet in a poem "On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet." He also described him as an individual who, through his care and affection toward people around him, demonstrated "the power of art without the show." Some excerpt goes in this way:

His virtues walk'd their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure th'Eternal Master found
The single talent well employ'd.


Dic/ caregiver, caretaker

caregiver (or care giver):

someone who is responsible for looking after another person, for ex., a person who is disabled, ill, or very young. (mainly AM)

caretaker (or care taker):
1) a person whose job it is to look after a large building such as a school or a block of flats or apartments, and deal with small repairs to it. (BRIT; in AM, use janitor)

2) A caretake is a person whose job it is to take cae of a house or property when the owner is not there.

4) someone who is responsible for looking after another person, for ex., a person who is disabled, ill, or very young. (maily AM; in BRIT, use carer)

...... COBUILD


 So, both caregiver and caretaker have the same meaning in American English?


2017년 6월 13일 화요일

[발췌] The Original Function of Groucho Marx's Resignation Joke


출처: http://www.16-9.dk/2007-02/side11_inenglish.htm

※ 발췌 (excerpt):

Groucho Marx sent the following wire to a Hollywood club he had joined: "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

2017년 6월 12일 월요일

[발췌] Capturing the Steve Jobs Legacy


출처: Leading Apple With Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius (Jay Elliot 지음 | John Wiley & Sons, 2012)



※ 발췌 (excerpt):

The concept of Apple University obviously stayed with Steve through the years. In 2008, he revived it, this time in a somewhat different form. He convinced Dr. Joel Podolny, the dean of Yale University's School of Management, to leave Yale and accept the title as dean of a revived Apple University. For some reason, Steve wanted to keep the project secret. Yale announced that Podolny was leaving to "lead educational initiatives at Apple"─clearly an intentionally cryptic phrase. Apple was silent, with not even a press release acknowledging Podolny's somewhat curious cover title as vice president of human resources, the same title I had once held.

Podolny had earlier been a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which is probably how Steve came to know of him. After becoming dean of Yale's management school, Podolny revamped the curriculum, replacing traditional courses in accounting and marketing with novel multidisciplinary programs. He was widely rumored to be in line for the position as a university president─a highly respected position and an opportunity it could not have been easy to walk away from. This was another example of the Jobsian powers of persuasion: when he decided on someone he wanted to hire, he was a very difficult man to say no to.

On leaving Yale, Podolny wrote to the students he was leaving behind, "While there are many great companies, I cannot think of one that has had a tremendous personal meaning for me as Apple." ( ... )

At Apple, a key part of his assignment was to explore the decision-making processes that had taken the company into some of its most unlikely directions, including the Apple stores and the iPhone. The lessons gleaned from examining these wildly successful deviations from the company's core business are now being taught to groups of up-and-coming Apple executives.

There was also a second task for Apple U, one even more significant for the training of future Apple managers. Podolny recruited other business school professors to help in the project of developing case studies. The goal: groom Apple executives in how to manage the Steve Jobs way. ( ... ... )

2017년 6월 11일 일요일

[발췌] 인간 꼴통성의 보편적인 다섯 가지 법칙


지은이: Corinne Purtill.
출처: Quartz, Apr 2017
Dic: if and when and how (and why)


In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity's greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society's total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who dies in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.

Let's take a look at Cipolla's five laws of human stupidity:

Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren't. Which takes us to:

Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine─gender, race, nationality, education level, income─possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. ( ... ... )

Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself.

( ... ... ) This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense. And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense. Cipolla imagined the four types along a graph, like this:

The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsisten bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplesslly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we're a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistency, acting at all times with unyielding idiocy.

However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nast rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to apper on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

All of which leads us to:

Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

And its corollary:

A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

( ... ... )

2017년 6월 9일 금요일

Dic/ it turns out that ...


출처 1: http://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/it-turns-out-that-clause

You use "it turns out that ___" when you got some information wrong, and you're now giving the correct information. You first have to say what you thought was true. (Or the listener might already know this from other conversations you've had.) Then you say something like:

  • It turns out that it's on Wednesday, not tomorrow.
  • So it turns out that I had been waiting on the wrong side of the train station.
You can use this phrase in the past tense too:
  • I thought it was at ten. It turned out that it was at eleven.
...
  • "It turns out that my roommate had left his window unlocked anyway."
  • "It was supposed to be an investment, but it turns out it actually depreciated in value."
  • "He thought he'd just sprained it, but it turned out it was fractured."

출처 2: “As it turned out, ____” vs “it turned out that ____”


출처 3: turn out

─ HAPPEN. to happen in a particular way or to have a particular result, esp. an unexpected one.
  • As events turned out, we were right to have decided to leave early.
  • How did the recipe turned out?
─ HAPPEN. to be known or discovered finally and surprisingly.
  • The truth turned out to be stranger than we had expected.
  • It turns out that she had known him when they were children.
─ GO. If people turn out for an event, they go to be there or to watch. CF. TURN UP (somewhere).
  • Thousands of people turned out to welcome the team home.

2017년 6월 7일 수요일

Dic/ no less: this is surprising to me, and must surprise you too


No less

─ this is surprising to me, and must surprise you too.

  • I happen to own the very same sweater─and in gree, no less.
  • They lost the first two games in a best-of-five series, and on their home field, no less.
..... Cambridge Dic of American Idioms

Dic/ sound as an adj meaning 'free from mistakes'


─ If you describe someone's ideas as sound, you mean that you approve of them and think they are correct.

  • I am not sure that this is sound democratic practice.
  • I think the idea of secularism is a very sound one.

─ free from mistkes: showing good judgment
  • a sound argument
  • She used sound reasoning in making the decision.
  • She gave us some sound advice.
  • a sound investment
─ (always used before a noun) complete or thorough
  • She has a sound understanding of the system's structure.
  • The stock market has made a sound recovery.
  • They gave us a sound beating in yesterday's game. [= They beat/defeated us easily by a large amount.]

─ valid, logical, or justifiable: a sound argument
─ thorough; complete: a sound examination

...... COBUILD, Merriam Webster Learner's Dic, Collins

2017년 6월 5일 월요일

[Search4] Morgenstern's passages on poker and nuclear war

※ 발췌 (excerpt):


출처 1: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/SELPAP/NUCLEARDETERRENCE/SB_NSG_SE_EM_JL_nuclear_mindreading_042513.pdf


5.4 The Current Inadequacy of Digital and Tabletop Games

5.4.1 Relevant Digital and Tabletop Games, in Brief

( ... ... ) This is not to say that we are the first group to appreciate the recalcitrance of nuclear strategy. The German-born economist Oskar Morgenstern, co-developer with John von Neumann of game theory, famously likened the Cold War to poker at a time when the underlying strategy used by strategists was derived from a different kind of game entirely.  He (1961) wrote: "The cold war sometimes compared to a giant chess game between ourselves and the Soviet Union [ ... ]. The analogy, however, is quite false, or while chess is a formidable game of almost unbelievale complexity, it lacks salient features of the political and military struggles with which it is compared." And, elaborating:

Chess is, to begin with, a game of complete information. That is, the chess opponent has no unknown cards, no means at his disposal which the other player cannot see and know all about. Every move is made in the open; consequently (AND THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT), there is no possibility of bluffing, no opportunity to deceive. Obviously, these conditions are far removed from political reality, where threats abound, where the threatening nation has to weigh the cost not only to its enemies, but to inself, where deceits is certainly not unheard of, and where chance intervenes, suddenly favoring firt one side, then another. [ ... ] The present cold war situation makes this need for strategic perception not only apparent but imperative. Thermonuclear disaster might be triggered at any time by a few false steps which become increasingly difficult to avoid as new conflict zones, like Cuba and Congo, arise. Furthermore, nuclear weapons are spreading ominously to more nations while the ability to deliver them anywhere, from any point on earth, is already in the hands of the two superpowers. [ ... ] With bluffs so much easier to make and threats so much more portentious than at any previous time in history, it is essential not only for our own State Department but for the entire world to understand what bluffs and threats mean; when they are appropriate; whether they should be avoided at all costs; in short, that is the sanest way to play this deadly, real life version of poker.

The 'way' that Morgenstern alludes to, we claim, aligns with what our framework offers. The real-life game that we are in is one that appears to be without visible end; furthermore, to extend the poker analogy, there also appears no way to leave the table.


출처 2: Chess vs. Poker in the Cold War: Planning Ahead vs. Reacting to the Last Hand

On February 5, 1961, Oskar Morgenstern wrote an article for ^The New York Times^ titled "The Cold War Is Cold Poker" that argued for poker─against chess─as the game best suited to parallel the ongoing diplomatic conflct between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

"The cold war is sometimes compared to a giant chess game between ourselves and the Sovient Union, and Russia's disburbingly frequent successes are sometimes attributed to the national preoccupation with chess," Morgenstern begins. "The analogy, however, is quite false, for while chess is a formidable game of almost unbelievable complexity, it lacks salient features of the political and military struggles with which it is compared."

Morgenstern argues that since "chess is the Russian national pastime and poker is ours, we ought to be more skillful than they in applying its precepts to the cold-war struggle." Alas (in his view) that had not been the case by early 1961. Thus does he proceed to argue in favor of the country's leaders becoming more studious about poker strategy, particularly highlighting the need to learn how bluff effectively (and responsibly) ^and^ to learn how to recognize the Soviets' bluffs, too.

"The problem of how, on the one hand, to make a threat effective and, on the other, to recognize a genuine threat by your opponent is one of the most fundamental of the day," writes Morgenstern.

( ... ... )

An early essay by von Neumann "On the Theory of Parlor Games" (1928) explored how poker's bluffing element helped make the game suitable to study as a means to learn  more about deceptive behaviors in other contexts. That essay was expanded upon considerably into a chapter called "Poker and Bluffing" in ^Theory of Games and Economic Behavior^ ( ... ... )

Morgenstern would go on to work as an advisor for Eisenhower, while von Neumann would likewise be involved in Cold War strategy while chairing a secret intercontinental Ballistic Missile Committee before his death in 1957. Thus by 1961 Morgenstern had well developed his "Cold War is Cold Poker" idea, and he lays it out in full in the ^NYT^ piece.

It was an influential argument. Kennedy would get variously credited with have reaffirmed the "we play poker, they play chess" idea, further underscoring both cultural differences and the contrasting strategic approaches of the two superpowers toward each other. And further promoting the "poker provides a better approach" argument as well.

Reading backward onto Cold War history, that strategic divide frequently gets presented in ways that are favorable to the U.S., with adopting a poker-like strategy often made to seem more practically useful given its more conspicuous attention to bluffing than is the case with chess. The fact that chess is "a game of complete information" (as Morgenstern points out) makes it less suitable than a partial information gaime like poker that "describes better what goes on in political reality where countries with opposing aims and ideals watch each other's every move with unveiled suspicion."

Those retrospectively viewing the conflict today (with knowledge of its ultimate outcome)─and indeed, contemporary commenting on it then like Morgenstern─therefore mostly champion the America's "poker" approach as preferable to Soviets' "chess" tactics.

Not everyone was agreeing with Morgenstern, however, that poker was ^necessarily^ a better source of Cold War strategy for the U.S. than was chess. A letter to the ^NYT^ by Louis Wiznitzer dated February 26, 1961 responded to Morgenstern's article by saying its pro-poker position "sums up pretty much the essential reasons why the United States has been steadily losing the cold war in the last 12 years."

"Whereas the Communists are waging a game of chess, with moves as scientifically planned as possible," noted Wiznitzer, "the Americans are improvising poker moves and bluffs, without a master plan or aim, and depending more or less on their last hand, or reacting to the enemy's bet." Since "politics is not a game nor simply an art" but rather a "science," he insists, the long-range thinking of chess is actually preferable to the overly reactive game of poker.

"You cannot beat chess with poker," he concludes.

It's an interesting reponse, and the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion less than two months later─soon recognized as a woefully shortsighted "play" with especially damaging consequences for the U.S.─probably helped convince many that Wiznitzer, not Morgenstern, was on the right side of this debate at the time.


출처 3: In Nuclear Poker, Don't Bet on Trump (James McManus, Bloomberg, Jan 2017)


Is North Korea's belligerent young leader, Kim Jong-un, bluffing when he says the "last stage" is underway for testing a ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S.? What about President-elect Donald Trump, when he tweets, "It won't happen"?

As Trump's administration begins, a showdown with North Korea over ICBMs seems all but inevitable. Just yesterday, South Korean media reported possible signs that the North may be preparing a new missle launch. In managing this conflict, few things will be more crucial than understanding the nature of bluffing. Unfortunately, for all his talk of being a good deal maker, Trump is a terrible bluffer─and his lack of skill is likely to destablize nuclear politics.

A bluff is an untrue but plausible story. In the mindset of poker, bluffs work when your opponent believes you have a better hand, so he can't call your your bet or raise, conceding you the pot. The savvier player wants to steadily grind away at the stack of his opponent over a large number of small pots, without risking too many of his own chips in any single hand. The weaker player can counter the "small ball" strategy by raising all-in fairly often, forcing all-or-nothing confrontations.

To understand why these dynamics are so crucial in nuclear negotiation, consider the work of John von Neumann, the prodigiously gifted polymath who immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary in 1933 and later contributed to the Manhattan Project. Von Neumann loved poker because its strategy involves guile, probability, luck and budgetary acumen, but is never transparent; it always depends on the counterstrategies deployed by opponents.

Expert players misrepresent the strength of their hands, stimulate irrational behavior, and deploy other mind games to confuse their opponents. In a nutshell, they bluff. It was von Neumann's efforts to express bluffs in mathematical terms that helped him develop game theory, which has numerous real-world applications, nuclear strategy foremost among them.

Von Neumann's main collaborator, Oskar Morgenstern, summed up the value of poker logic in 1961: "The Cold War sometimes compared to a giant chess game. The analogy, however, is quite false, for while chess is a formidable game of almost unbelievable complexity, it lacks salient features of the political and military struggles with which it is compared." As a game of complete information, chess provides no opportunity to bluff, leaving it "far removed rom political reality ... where threatening nation has to weigh the cost not only to its enemies, but to itself."

"If chess is the Russian national pastime and poker is ours," he continued, "we ought to be more skillful than they in applying its precepts ... With bluffs so much  easier to make and threats so much more portentous than any previous time in history, it is essential not only for our own State Department but for the entire world to understand what bluffs and threats mean; when they are appropriate; whether they should be avoided at all cost; in short, what is the sanest way to play this deadly, real-life version of poker."

Trump bluffs almost constantly. He has spent his entire adult life overstating the value of his real estate holdings and branding endeavor, while bragging relentlessly about his wealth, sex life, length off the tee, and on and on. His bluffs during the campaign─that he had a replacement for Obamacare, a secret plan to defeat Islamic State and so on─were plainly false to anyone paying attention. To Trump, what was true hardly mattered.

Such tendencies would not serve him well in a poker game. Any player who continually misrepresents the size of his hand would cause sharp opponents to give his bets little credit. They simply wait for above-average hands and call him. As Daniel Negreanu, the all-time winningest poker tournament player, put it to me, "Trump's bluffs are very effective against level-one thinkers. His lies are so outlandish that people think they have to be true or he wouldn't have said it. The constant barrage makes him tougher to read. But sharper players would pick him apart."

Kim may not be irrational, but he knows how to seem that he is, which gives him leverage. ( ... ... ) As Negreanu puts it, Kim is "a scary player. Being unpredictable, capable of any move at any time, makes him hard to prepare for."

( ... ... )


출처 4: James McManus, "Game Theory: Poker; Bluffing and the Royal Flush of Cold Warfare," NYT, Oct 2005.


Nicholas D. Kristof recently wrote on the Op-Ed page of this newspaper about North Korean power plants that may be capable of producing weapons-grade nuclear materials: "It's possible that North Korea is bluffing or is resuming construction only to have one more card to negotiate away."

( ... ... )

By the midle of the 20th century, with the nuclear arms race neck and neck, two brilliant Princeton professors helped the United States pull ahead of the Soviet Union. The economist Oskar Morgenstern served as a close adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a math whiz named John von Neumann made vital contributions to the Manhattan Project, information theory and computer technology. Perhaps most important, both men provided deep mathematical insight into the nature of bluffing when they wrote "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" in 1944.

Their 647-page magnum opus was a groundbreaking model of econmics and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. ( ... ... )

As Morgenstern wrote later: "The cold war is sometimes compared to a giant chess game between the United States and the Soviet Union, and Russia's frequent successes are sometimes attributed to the national preoccupation with chess. The analogy, however, is quite false, for while chess is a formidable game of almost unbelievable complexity, it lacks salient features of the political and military struggles with which it is compared."

Since chess is a game of complete information, it offers no opportunities to bluff, which leaves it ''far removed from political reality where the threatening nation has to weigh the cost not only to its enemies, but to itself, where deceit is certainly not unheard of, and where chance intervenes.''

Such elements were basic to poker, which Morgenstern called "a game of wile and artifice" and used all caps to emphasize that "THE BEST HAND NEED NOT WIN." Consistent winners, he wrote, "rely on their ability to perceive opportunities offered by each changing situation, and on artful deception through bluffing."

He conceded that chess might be a more moral game but insisted that poker tactics were more useful when "countries with opposing aims and ideals watch each other's move with unveiled suspicion.'' He concluded, ''If chess is the Russian national pastime and poker is ours, we ought to be more skillful than they in applying its precepts."

( ... ... )


출처 5: James McManus, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

( ... ... ) As Morgenstern put it in 1961, "The Cold War is sometimes compared to a giant chess game. The analogy, however, is quite false, for while chess is a formidable game of almost unbelievable complexity, it lacks salient features of the political and military struggles with which it is compared." Because chess is a game of complete information, it provides no opportunity to bluff, leaving it "far removed from political reality ... where the threatening nation has to weigh the cost not only to its enemies, but to itself, where deceit is certainly not unheard of, and where chance intervenes." Luck, deceit, and cost-effectiveness are basic to poker, a game in which "the best hand need not win." It is the bluff that makes poker the most useful model for "countries with opposing aims and ideals [who] watch each other's every move with unveiled suspicion."

"If chess is the Russian national pastime and poker is ours," Morgenstern continues, "we ought to be more skillful than they in applying its precepts to the cold-war struggle." We need to be strategically astute because "nuclear weapons are spreading ominously while the ability to deliver them anywhere, from any point on earth, is already in the hands of the two super-powers. With bluffs so much easier to make and threats so much more portentous than any previous time in history, it is essential not only for our own State Department but for the entire world to understand what bluffs and threats mean; when they are appropriate; whether they should be avoided at all cost; in short, what is the sanest way to play this deadly, real-life version of poker."

Parallels between poker and nuclear showdowns aren't neat or one-to-one, yet no game more closely resembles military and diplomatic maneuvres. Morgenstern says they are "similar enout so that something substantial can be learned from good poker principles. Corresponding to each player's cards and chips, you have the quantity and quality of a country's weapons, the disturbance which one country can cause another, and the changes in national plans than can be imposed. Bluffs correspond to the numerous threats being made with increasing frequency on the contemporary international scene."

It is worth noting here that the old Germanic word ^bluffen^ means "to bluster or frighten." The English version, combining both meanings, first appeared around 1665, as bluff-based vying games like ^pochen^ and brag became popular. No other kind of game so perfectly captured the essence of this deceitful yet potentially lifesaving tactic─of making someone believe you will fight to the death if necessary, without having to actually shed any blood, let alone evaporate cities.

While Stalin seldom bluffed, his successors regrettably picked up the knack. "Unquestionably the most successful bluff, by either side," writes Morgenstern, "was the Soviet Union's threat in 1956 to rain missiles on England unless she stopped her actions in Egypt" during the Suez crisis. He also believed the West was bluffed by the simple roadblocks the Red Army put up around West Berlin. Instead of a massively expensive airlift, all we needed were a few tanks to break through the roadblocks. "We held strong cards but we didn't know how to use them. We fell for a bluff that was easy to recognize as a bluff, even ... when our total nuclear power was so much greater than that of Soviets.

"If the Communists," he continues, "seem to be superior players to date, it is perhaps not so much because of their tactics in playing any particular hand, as because of their firmer adherence to sound optimal strategy." Then he presciently adds, "the United States has, with some justice, been criticized for being alternately too uncertain of its line ... and too rigid, as in our refusal to recognize Red China─the most populous country in the world and, in a few decades, sure to be one of the most powerful."

In March 1955, Eisenhower had pulled off a nuclear bluff against Mao Zedong over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu during a war between China and Taiwan. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that the United States was considering a nuclear strike on the mainland, with Admiral Robert B. Carney adding that Eisenhower was planning "to destroy Red China's military potential." When the Soviets signaled an unwillingness to threaten nuclear retaliation for a U.S. attack, Mao backed down. But in 1960, Eisenhower got called, as it were, by Khrushchev when a U-2 spy plane was forced down in the heart of Russia─on May Day, no less. After initially denying it was a spy plane, Eisenhower was forced to admit that it was when Khrushchev produced the pilot and plane. Morgenstern describes Khrushchev as "alternately acting the clown, the bon vivant, and the ogre, yet never stepping completely out of character and managing to keep his non-Communist audience in a state of chronic uncertainty."

( ... ... )