Schelling Points
0:00 I'm about to hand you 10,000. But to get it, you have to find me. I will be in the basement of someone you know, but you can't ask any of your friends. You have to pick the basement based on your best guess.
The question is, who will you pick? To get it right, you'll have to make use of what's been called the Schelling point. This was the fate of Consul Marcus Regulus, co-head of the Roman state. During the first Punic War, the Carthaginians had managed to capture him. They promised him release if he would plead with the Roman Senate to hand them back a few of their own guys. The only question was, which ones deserved release.
0:48 By the time he'd gotten to Rome, he'd figured it out. None of them. He was, after all, untouchable. The Punic envoy wasn't going to start a fight with the consular Lictors, but that wasn't it. Marcus had to be honest with the senators. His old, frail body wasn't worth even one of those strapping Punic captives.
The Senate applauded and it was settled. The captives would stay. But what about Marcus? To get out of a tough spot without lying, you have to be resourceful. Slave or free, unbound or facing a monster, you'll always have one thing. And no one knew this better than Odysseus. Trapped with the Cyclops Polyphemus, simply attacking wasn't enough. Cyclopes lived in earshot of each other, attacking, then lying about their identity still would have attracted attention. Odysseus knew this.
1:46 So when Polyphemus asked for his name, Odysseus had to think with a resource that made sure he wouldn't get caught. If you're under constant surveillance, your words will only get you so far. To shrink Axis forces in Sicily before invasion, British intelligence couldn't rely on any everyday resource.
They needed something more salient, and they called it Operation Mincemeat. Major Martin was the man for the job. His record was spotless. He could be trusted not to defect. Martin would enter the coast of Spain with fake documents on his person.
2:29 Local officials would then promptly hand him over to German military intelligence, who would make copies of the documents and act accordingly. This, of course, would come at no risk to Martin, since he was already dead. Before the operation, there was no Major Martin. There was, however, a cadaver, a Mr. Glyndwr Michael.
The question for British intelligence was how to pass off this cadaver as a major to trick the Germans. After World War II, the American military was interested in a very similar question. Luckily for them, a Yale professor was already hard at work on it. He proposed to his students the following hypothetical. Suppose someone wanted to meet up with you in New York to hand you money, but you couldn't ask them where they would be. Where would you go to maximize your chances of finding them?
3:22 One by one, they answered, and one by one, as he tabulated, most of them seemed to answer with the same location. Paul Sylbert was in some hot water. He was a no-name in Hollywood, but he had friends in high places, so Embassy Studios was willing to hear him out. Only problem, the studio lead didn't really seem to give much of a shit about the screenplay he was presenting. But Paul noticed something over the studio lead's shoulder. It was a picture of him with the uncle of a previous investor in one of Sylbert's screenplays.
Sylbert felt he needed a new angle, and so he decided to change the topic of conversation. How do you know Andrew Wyeth? As it happened, the studio lead Joseph Levine had just purchased a house from which Wyeth used to work and transformed it into a museum of his paintings. When Wyeth initially painted the house, he thought it was a dud. But within days of its reaching New York, he started receiving letters about people enraptured with the woman in front of the house. Christina, as she was called, was none other than one of the house's residents. Wyeth just happened to see her one day, crawling on the yard due likely to polio, and he was struck. So, of course, was Levine. The executives in the room said he went crazy. After an hour of talking about nothing but the Wyeths, Levine had his fill and greenlit the picture with Sylbert directing. The house still exists today, and like Christina in the painting, many people since Levine have been drawn to it in hopes of finding artistic connection.
4:56 The house isn't too dissimilar from Christina herself, or perhaps from Grand Central Station, where most of Thomas Schelling's students agreed to meet someone for money independently. Schelling called these focal points of attention convergent, containing unique signals that coordinated mutual expectations without anybody having to talk about it. They make us feel something almost inevitably, and when the British had to trick the Germans, they knew this all too well. Though Major Martin didn't exist, his doctored love letters and photos of his sweetheart sure did.
And with that glut of evidence combined with the dead body, the Germans converged so strongly on belief in Major Martin that even Hitler himself was convinced. Odysseus did the same, knowing that Cyclopes are generally stupid, he knew that he could use a pronoun, Οὖτις, or nobody, in place of his real name. He likewise knew that without a name, when Polyphemus asked for help, no attention would converge upon him, and he could escape from the cave with his bedfellows. As for Marcus Regulus, well, he was in a slightly different situation. At least according to legend, he kept up his agreement with the Carthaginians. Without any slaves being set free, he went back to Carthage, where he was promptly imprisoned and killed.
6:01 And though doing so didn't maximize his utility, doing otherwise would have brought him great dishonor. Away from the Senate meeting grounds on the Capitoline Hill was a temple just south of that of Jupiter. On its face, the Romans had displayed bronze tablets containing treaties and agreements, including those with Carthage. Inside that temple was perhaps an early focal or Schelling point. That Schelling point was a statue to the goddess of faith.
And with her watchful gaze looking over the head of Rome, it's hard to see how Marcus could have lied to get his reward. To get that 10 grand, you would need to find that most popular house among your friends, that Schelling point where you would all congregate. Once you start looking, you'll start seeing these convergent focal points all around you. And indeed, it's hard to see how we could cooperate without them.
6:50 If you ever have to make a decision with your back against the wall, or out of moral duty, or perhaps with a picture looking over your shoulder, you might want to consider the Schelling points already directing your attention. Thank you so much for watching this video, and thank you to the patrons who are supporting my work. This video would not have been possible without all of you. If you like this video, please do let me know. If you didn't like it, please also let me know in the comments. I'm always striving to write more clearly and find ideas that I think will resonate with people if you neither liked nor disliked it but want to know a little bit more about Schelling points and the resources I was thinking with as I wrote the video, then please do take a look at the video on my second channel that is linked in the description below.
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