this is partly prompted by Trump but also not really exclusive to him: people lack good mental models for adversaries that are neither totally stupid or omnipotent. and in particular adversaries that are often erratic and opportunistic

I've thought a lot about this, both in terms of the intellectual aspects as well as episodes from my personal life where i've had to deal with this sort of person

most people intuitively shy away from confrontations with these type of agents mostly because of how inevitably draining and difficult it is. there's very little way to make it easier on yourself outright

still there often circumstances where you are forced to do it anyway. and during those moments you can find yourself suddenly feeling helplessly ignorant. what is this person thinking? why are they doing this?

part of the mistake is the "thinking" part. a lot of very sophisticated behavior emerges from below the surface, including your own.

but another thing is that you often may underestimate how much the seemingly baffling behavior has been successful. one person that i knew had a habit of repeatedly finding new patrons and then having explosive fallings-outs with them

but every time i thought he finally had burned his last bridge, he popped up with a different person that was willing to back him. it became a running joke

one of the most pernicious aspects of this too, which is somewhat familiar to behavioral game theory people, is that assuming a more competent opponent actually makes you more vulnerable

in the waning days when computers did not totally dominate chess, "computer-killer" moves were things that were too dumb to use on skilled humans but things a machine simply would never predict

a lot of this is underestimating the utility of simple but adaptive behaviors, but also overestimating how much behaviors that deviate from the norm are actually punished

i began my interest in this in a more intellectual/current news esque sense but most of my interest has actually become more personal.

the "real world" is full of these people. they may be a troublesome neighbor, a dysfunctional family member, a significant other/partner that suddenly becomes toxic, or a co-worker you dislike

they're far from exotic, they're actually really the most common kind of adversary most of us encounter in our lives. they're not madmen (or people pretending to be mad), but they also aren't normal either

what's really fascinating about this to me is the ubiquity of these people coupled with the perception that they're rare, and the paucity of "academic" material about them

after one particular damaging and bruising fight that I managed to get out of -- but not without significant personal damage -- I tried to find some contextualization for my experience and came up empty

since then i've read a lot of bits and pieces of various fields looking for the missing knowledge i was after, much more interested in the actual personal and practical experience than the big intellectual payoff