There’s a story I like to tell, which I vaguely remembered as originating at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. A researcher had a rubber duck in his office. When he found himself stumped on a problem, he would pick up the duck, walk over to a colleague, and ask them to hold the duck. He would proceed to explain the problem, often realizing the solution himself in the middle of the explanation. Then he would say, “Thank you for holding my duck”, and leave.
I’m in the middle of the third book in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. In brief, Caro’s thesis is that (1) Lyndon Johnson cares only about power, and (2) Lyndon Johnson is spectacularly skilled at politics. Moreover, (2) holds in a strong sense: Johnson is not simply skilled at politics, but far more skilled than nearly everyone around him. As a result, Johnson’s life is an example of asymmetric play in a theoretically symmetric game, and a beautiful illustration of how such asymmetric play is equivalent to the game itself having asymmetric rules.