"It Must Suck to be You, Doreen."

Someone on an open board wrote: "It must suck to be you, Doreen. You're always bored."

I take the accusations that are leveled at me seriously unless there are good reasons not to. I thought about why though it doesn't suck to be me, it is true that I am bored a good deal of the time.

I'm bored a good deal of the time, outside the rarified realm of Laputa Manque, because the world that people in the average IQ range have created for themselves looks like the kiddy section of an amusement park to me.

In the course of doing research for a proposal for electoral reform in Israel that I am working on, I reconsidered Kenneth Arrow's paradox.

Kenneth Arrow's paradox, or impossibility theorem, is defined as a *non-trivial game*. He was searching for a *social welfare function* that will allow the will of the electorate to be maximally expressed in the make-up of the government. He relied on game theory, of course, to try to come up with such a function.

Game theory, per se, would bore me if it was in no wise applicable to social welfare. It would be no more interesting than playing poker, which I haven't played since I was a kid, except one time when the other D2 and I started dating and he said I don't play games because I can't. I proved him wrong and put playing card games behind me, probably forever. But game theory has always been intimately tied to fair distribution when absolutely fair distribution seems impossible, and so I find it interesting.

Game theory doesn't bore me - precisely because it is applied toward social welfare. Mathematicians who do game theory get their Nobel Prizes in Economics.

When I look at myself and the world I see around me honestly, I come to the sad conclusion that precious few provisions have been made to provide Human beings with entertainments that are at once enjoyable and which effect positive changes, or attempt to. Most entertainments are frivolities and fritter time away. They leave neither society nor the entertained edified or bettered in any way. Usually the inverse is true.

In a world in which there are so few challenges presented in everyday life to play games that are also searchings for solutions to Human problems I'll remain bored a good deal of the time in ordinary society.

It is their world that sucks. Not me.

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com