1-2-Brex-U What TiR's pointless notes reflect it to have been thinking about, exactly a year ago at this time:
"A man's been elected, and you voted for him. . . . We all voted for him . . . because we thought no one else would vote for him. Putney Swope is the new chairman of this board. And I will defend that mistake with my life."
from Robert Downey Sr.'s timeless "Putney Swope" (1969) see minutes 7 through 14, here TiR wonders if the wizards of geopolitics or game theory have a name for the phenomenon: a kind of lock-in, a self-reinforcing, accelerating, downward, vicious spiral; whereby a certain species of bad choice can force all agents into inevitably having fewer options, all bad; with the available information always foggier, less reliable, more schizophrenic or, in retrospect, tragically misleading; with the stakes of failure or wrong choice ratcheting ever up; wherein each successive choice likewise can never simply be dodged, shrugged off, pushed onto external others or ultimately escaped; leading in every next "round" to even fewer and worse options, among which each "player" again must chose; and so on. Call it Tuchman's Problem?
The story of our century, perhaps. But let's hope not?
