She abandoned that train of thought, and read on to the end of the piece. “No agency operates in a vacuum,” it said. That was one way to put it! The NSF had been buffeted, grown, stagnated, adapted—done the best it could. Throughout all, its basic purposes and methods had held fast: to support basic research; to award grants rather than purchase contracts; to decide things by peer-review rather than bureaucratic fiat; to hire skilled scientists for permanent staff; to hire temporary staff from the expert cutting edges in every field.
Anna believed in all these, and she believed they had done demonstrable good. Fifty thousand proposals a year, eighty thousand people peer-reviewing them, ten thousand new proposals funded, twenty thousand grants continuing to be supported. All functioning to expand scientific knowledge, and the influence of science in human affairs.
She sat back in her chair, thinking it over. All that basic research, all that good work; and yet—thinking over the state of the world—somehow it had not been enough. Possibly they would have to consider doing something more.
* * *
Primates in the driver’s seat. It looked like they should all be dead. Multicar accidents, bloody incidents of road rage. Cars should have been ramming one another in huge demolition derbies, a global auto-da-fé.
But they were primates, they were social creatures. The brain had ballooned to its current size precisely to enable it to make the calculations necessary to get along in groups. These were the parts of the brain engaged when people drove in crowded traffic. Thus along with all the jockeying and frustration came the almost subliminal satisfactions of winning a competition, or the grudging solidarities of cooperating to mutual advantage. Let that poor idiot merge before his on-ramp lane disappeared; it would pay off in the overall speed of traffic. Thus the little primate buzz.
When things went well. But so often what one saw were people playing badly. It was like a giant game of prisoners’ dilemma, the classic game in which two prisoners are separated and asked to tell tales on the other one, with release offered to them if they do. The standard computer model scoring system had it that if the prisoners cooperate with each other by staying silent, they each get three points; if both defect against the other, they each get one point; and if one defects and the other doesn’t, the defector gets five points and the sap gets zero points. Using this scoring system to play the game time after time, there is a first iteration which says, it is best always to defect. That’s the strategy that will gain the most points over the long haul, the computer simulations said—if you are only playing strangers once, and never seeing them again. And of course traffic looked as if it were that situation.
But the shadow of the future made all the difference. Day in and day out you drove into the same traffic jam, with the same basic population of players. If you therefore played the game as if playing with the same opponent every time, which in a sense you were, with you learning them and them learning you, then more elaborate strategies would gain more points than always defect. The first version of the more successful strategy was called tit for tat, in which you did to your opponent what they last did to you. This out-competed always defect, which in a way was a rather encouraging finding. But tit for tat was not the perfect strategy, because it could spiral in either direction, good or bad, and the bad was an endless feud. Thus further trials had found successful variously revised versions of tit for tat, like generous tit for tat, in which you gave opponents one defection before turning on them, or always generous, which in certain limited conditions worked well. Or, the most powerful strategy Frank knew of, an irregularly generous tit for tat, where you forgave defecting opponents once before turning on them, but only about a third of the time, and unpredictably, so you were not regularly taken advantage of by one of the less cooperative strategies, but could still pull out of a death spiral of tit-for-tat feuding if one should arise. Various versions of these firm but fair irregular strategies appeared to be best if you were dealing with the same opponent over and over.
In traffic, at work, in relationships of every kind—social life was nothing but a series of prisoners’ dilemmas. Compete or cooperate? Be selfish or generous? It would be best if you could always trust other players to cooperate, and safely practice always generous; but in real life people did not turn out to earn that trust. That was one of the great shocks of adolescence, perhaps, that realization; which alas came to many at an even younger age. And after that you had to work things out case by case, your strategy a matter of your history, or your personality, who could say.
Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than Frank could have walked. He wondered how it was that certain turn-signal indicators managed to express a great desperation to change lanes, while others seemed patient and dignified. The speed of blinking, perhaps, or how close the car hugged the lane line it wanted to cross. Although rapid blinking did look insistent and whiny, while slow blinking bespoke a determined inertia.
It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. On the West Coast they played tit for tat, or even firm but fair, because it moved things along faster. Maybe this only meant Californians had lived through that many more freeway traffic jams. People had learned the game from birth, sitting in their baby seats, and so in California cars in two merging lanes would alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the game and play it right. Even young males cooperated. In that sense if none other, California was indeed the edge of history, the evolutionary edge of Homo automobilicus.
Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about, everyone girding up to get one point in a crash. Every SUV was a defection. Then there were the little cars that always gave way, the saps. A terrible combination. It was so slow, so unnecessarily, unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.
And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction of traffic: you could loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain could explain this, so it was like witnessing magic, the “technological sublime” people spoke of, which was the emotion experienced when the primate mind could not find a natural explanation for what it saw.
And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and just curse someone ferociously, from a few feet away, and yet have no ramifications to such a grave social transgression. It was not much compared to the satisfactions of cooperation, but perhaps rarer. It was something, anyway.
He crept forward in his car, cursing. He should not have gotten onto the Beltway. It was often badly overloaded at this hour. Stop and go, inch along. Curse defectors and saps. Inch along.
It stayed so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to get there for the panel to start on time; there was no slack in the schedule. The panel members were all in town, having spent a boring night the night before, probably. And the Holiday Inn in the Ballston complex often did not have enough hot water to supply everyone showering at that hour of the morning, so some of the panelists would be grumpy about that. Some would be gathering at this very moment in their third floor conference room, ready to go and feeling that there wasn’t enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded it on purpose, and they had flights home late the next day that they could not miss. To arrive late in this situation would be bad form indeed, no matter traffic on the Beltway. There would be looks, or perhaps a joke or two from Pritchard or Lee; he would have to explain himself, make excuses. It could interfere with his plan. He cursed the driver of a car cutting uselessly in front of him.
Then he was coming on Route 66, and impulsively he decided to get on it going east, even though at this hour it was restr
icted to High Occupancy Vehicles only. Normally Frank obeyed this rule, but feeling a little desperate, he took the turn and curved onto 66, where traffic was indeed moving faster. Every vehicle was occupied by at least two people, of course, and Frank stayed in the right lane and drove as unobtrusively as possible, counting on the generally inward attention of multiply occupied vehicles to keep too many people from noticing his transgression. Of course there were highway patrol cars on the lookout for lawbreakers like Frank, so he was taking a risk that he didn’t like to take, but it seemed to him a lower risk than staying on the Beltway as far as arriving late was concerned.
He drove in great suspense, therefore, until finally he could signal to get off at Fairfax. Then as he approached he saw a police car parked beside the exit, its officers walking back toward their car after dealing with another miscreant. They might easily look up and see him.
A big old pickup truck was slowing down to exit before him, and again without pausing to consider his actions, Frank floored the accelerator, swerved around the truck on its left side, using it to block the policemen’s view, then cut back across in front of the truck, accelerating so as not to bother it. Room to spare and no one the wiser. He curved to the right down the exit lane, slowing for the light around the turn.
Suddenly there was loud honking from behind, and his rearview mirror had been entirely filled by the front grille of the pickup truck, its headlights at about the same height as the roof of his car. Frank speeded up. Then, closing on the car in front of him, he had to slow down. Suddenly the truck was now passing him on the left, as he had passed it earlier, even though this took the truck up onto the exit lane’s tilted shoulder. Frank looked and glimpsed the infuriated face of the driver, leaning over to shout down at him. Long stringy hair, mustache, red skin, furious anger.
Frank looked over again and shrugged, making a face and gesture that said What? He slowed down so that the truck could cut in front of him, a good thing as it slammed into the lane so hard it missed Frank’s left headlight by an inch. He would have struck Frank for sure if Frank hadn’t slowed down. What a jerk!
Then the guy hit his brakes so hard that Frank nearly rear-ended him, which could have been a disaster given how high the truck was jacked up: Frank would have hit windshield first.
“What the fuck!” Frank said, shocked. “Fuck you! I didn’t come anywhere near you!”
The truck came to a full stop, right there on the exit.
“Jesus, you fucking idiot!” Frank shouted.
Maybe Frank had cut closer to this guy than he thought he had. Or maybe the guy was hounding him for driving solo on 66, even though he had been doing the same thing himself. Now his door flew open and out he jumped, swaggering back toward Frank. He caught sight of Frank still shouting, stopped and pointed a quivering finger, reached into the bed of his truck and pulled out a crowbar.
Frank reversed gear, backed up and braked, shifted into drive and spun his steering wheel as he accelerated around the pickup truck’s right side. People behind them were honking, but they didn’t know the half of it. Frank zoomed down the now empty exit lane, shouting triumphant abuse at the crazy guy.
Unfortunately the traffic light at the end of the exit ramp was red and there was a car stopped there, waiting for it to change. Frank had to stop. Instantly there was a thunk and he jerked forward. The pickup truck had rear-ended him, tapping him hard from behind.
“YOU FUCKER!” Frank shouted, now frightened; he had tangled with a madman! The truck was backing up, presumably to ram him again, so he put his little Honda in reverse and shot back into the truck, like hitting a wall, then shifted again and shot off into the narrow gap to the right of the car waiting at the light, turning right and accelerating into a gap between the cars zipping by, which caused more angry honks. He checked his rearview mirror and saw the light had changed and the pickup truck was turning to follow him, and not far behind. “Shit!”
Frank accelerated, saw an opening in traffic coming the other way, and took a sharp left across all lanes onto Glebe, even though it was the wrong direction for NSF. Then he floored it and began weaving desperately through cars he was rapidly overtaking, checking the rearview mirror when he could. The pickup appeared in the distance, squealing onto Glebe after him. Frank cursed in dismay.
He decided to drive directly to a fire station he recalled seeing on Lee Highway. He took a left on Lee and accelerated as hard as the little fuel-cell car could to the fire station, squealing into its parking lot and then jumping out and hurrying toward the building, looking back down Lee toward Glebe.
But the madman never appeared. Gone. Lost the trail, or lost interest. Off to harass someone else.
Cursing still, Frank checked his car’s rear. No visible damage, amazingly. He got back in and drove south to the NSF building, involuntarily reliving the experience. He had no clear idea why it had happened. He had driven around the guy but he had not really cut him off, and though it was true he had been poaching on 66, so had the guy. It was inexplicable. And it occurred to him that in the face of such behavior modeling devices like prisoners’ dilemma were useless. People did not make rational judgments. Especially, perhaps, the people driving too-large pickup trucks, this one of the dirty-and-dinged variety rather than the factory-fresh steroidal battleships that the area’s carpenters drove. Possibly then it had been some kind of class thing, the resentment of an unemployed gas-guzzler against a white-collar type in a fuel-cell car. The past attacking the future, reactionary attacking progressive, poor attacking affluent. A beta male in an alpha machine, enraged that an alpha male thought he was so alpha he could zip around in a beta machine and get away with it.
Something like that. Some kind of asshole jerk-off loser, already drunk and disorderly at seven A.M.
Despite all that, Frank found himself driving into the NSF building’s basement parking with just enough time to get to the elevators and up to the third floor at the last possible on-time moment. He hurried to the men’s room, splashed water on his face. He had to clear his mind of the ugly incident immediately, and it had been so strange and unpleasant that this was not particularly difficult. Incongruent awfulness without consequence is easily dismissed from the mind. So he pulled himself together, went out to do his job. Time to concentrate on the day’s work. His plan for the panel was locked in by the people he had convened for it. The scare on the road only hardened his resolve, chilled his blood.
He entered the conference room assigned to their panel. Its big inner window gave everyone the standard view of the rest of NSF, and the panelists who hadn’t been there before looked up into the beehive of offices making the usual comments about Rear Window and the like. “A kind of ersatz collegiality,” one of them said, must have been Nigel Pritchard.
“Keeps people working.”
On the savannah a view like this would have come from a high outcrop, where the troop would be resting in relative safety, surveying everything important in their lives. In the realm of grooming, of chatter, of dominance conflicts. Perfect, in other words, for a grant proposal evaluation panel, which in essence was one of the most ancient of discussions: whom do we let in, whom do we kick out? A basic troop economy, of social credit, of access to food and mates—everything measured and exchanged in deeds good and bad—yes—it was another game of prisoners’ dilemma. They never ended.
Frank liked this one. It was very nuanced compared to most of them, and one of the few still outside the world of money. Anonymous peer-review—unpaid labor—a scandal!
But science didn’t work like capitalism. That was the rub, that was one of the rubs in the general dysfunction of the world. Capitalism ruled, but money was too simplistic and inadequate a measure of the wealth that science generated. In science, one built up over the course of a career a fund of “scientific credit,” by giving work to the system in a way that could seem altruistic. People remembered what you gave, and later on there were various forms of return on the gift—jobs, labs. In that se
nse a good investment for the individual, but in the form of a gift to the group. It was the non zero-sum game that prisoners’ dilemma could become if everyone played by the strategies of always generous, or, better, firm but fair. That was one of the things science was—a place that one entered by agreeing to hold to the strategies of cooperation, to maximize the total return of the game.
In theory that was true. It was also the usual troop of primates. There was a lot of tit for tat. Defections happened. Everyone was jockeying for a lab of their own, or any project of their own. As long as that was generating enough income for a comfortable physical existence for oneself and one’s family, then one had reached the optimal human state. Having money beyond that was unnecessary, and usually involved a descent into the world of hassle and stupidity. That was what greed got you. So there was in science a sufficiency of means, and an achievable limit to one’s goals, that kept it tightly aligned with the brain’s deepest savannah values. A scientist wanted the same things out of life as an Australopithecus; and here they were.
Thus Frank surveyed the panelists milling about the room with a rare degree of happiness. “Let’s get started.”
They sat down, putting laptops and coffee cups beside the computer consoles built into the tabletop. These allowed the panelists to see a spreadsheet page for each proposal in turn, displaying their grades and comments. This particular group all knew the drill. Some of them had met before, more had read one another’s work.
There were eight of them sitting around the long cluttered conference table.
Dr. Frank Vanderwal, moderator, NSF (on leave from University of California, San Diego, Department of Bioinformatics).
Dr. Nigel Pritchard, Georgia Institute of Technology, Computer Sciences.
Dr. Alice Freundlich, Harvard University, Department of Biochemistry.
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