Tiger Bait

How does game theory
apply to game drives?

When they heard that I was going on game drives in India in search of Bengal tigers in the wild, some of my friends asked me if I'm an aspiring wildlife photographer. I told them no, I'm just interested in sticking myself out there to see what it's all about. They shook their heads and said "Don't you get it: you're just tiger bait for those two photographers." When I told Joan this, she laughed and suggested that perhaps I could practice dragging one of my legs behind me a little bit as if I were wounded.

None of us ever know what will draw us to things or events or places or people. What invisible strings exist, lying silently dormant until a connection is made; a chord is struck and then resonates for the rest of our lives. Some harmonics are strong and thrum through you with a force that rules. Others are small undercurrents playing the supporting riffs and trills that make life so very interesting. How can you possibly predict how the melody will play out?

I recently read about a man who makes a living by forecasting the outcome of events through game theory, a mathematical process that analyzes interactions. This man, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, describes it as a math for how people behave strategically. You can read about him in the current issue of Good magazine.

A political scientist in the truest sense of the title, he forecasts political events, election campaigns, and even terms of treaties by observing human interactions through a scientific lens. His accuracy rate is an astounding 90%.

He starts with a set of assumptions about each actor's motives. He states, "If you liberate people from the constraint of having to satisfy other people in order to advance themselves, people don't do good things." Apparently, if left to our own devices, we seem to be herd animals who act as predators when we have nothing to govern us.

I want to not believe this. I want to go all Anne Frank on you and write that no matter how much evil I might possibly see in the world, I will still believe in the deep-down, basic goodness of human beings. But 90%?

When I look at us through the tiger's eye, I see a species that has wantonly destroyed habitats, killed for sport and superstition, and unconscionably spread beyond the ability of the local environment to support us. Actions that support Mr. Bueno de Mesquita's presumptions. At the top of the food chain in quality of power, we would be somewhere in the middle at best if ranked by quantity. There are simply too many of us to warrant the pinnacle of the ecosystem. An imbalance that I'll bet nature abhors.

Perhaps this trip is about feeling a different tilt of the scales -- an adjustment that swings back closer to the way that nature intended it to be. Joan told me that it's an amazing sensation to be out in the jungle. She said that your senses blaze alive as you've never experienced them when you sit waiting in anticipation of the big animals -- that you feel as though you've been numb until now.

This is the chord that is struck. This is the thing that I want to experience. To feel the shocking electricity of my senses all jolting alive more than they've ever been. To feel the vibration of a harmonic not yet known.


Hmmm. Tiger bait, indeed. I believe the tiger is baiting me.