The double tragedy of Rohith Vemula

  Carl Sagan's widow has written a heart felt letter expressing her sorrow at the suicide of Rohith Vemula.
  Not being familiar with conditions in India, the lady naturally thought that Rohith had died because of prejudice- perhaps that of obscurantist Hindu priests against Scientifically inclined young people from working class backgrounds.
  'To read his (Vemula’s) suicide note and to learn the details of his predicament is to get a vivid inkling of the actual cost of bias to our civilization."

The problem here is that Vemula had received a generous Government scholarship to pursue a PhD program which included some Scientific and Mathematical courses. He chose to switch to Sociology. Still, had he concentrated on his studies, there was nothing stopping him from becoming a writer- if not one like Carl Sagan precisely- then still someone who wrote clearly and engaged with alethic material.

  It so happened that the University he was studying at had previously curbed the power of the Students Union because of serious bloodshed on campus. Since the political situation in the State has improved, the administration should have handed back power to the students. If they had done so then the dominant group could have beaten or harassed the weaker groups to their hearts' content without the police getting involved or any one getting suspended or being forced to quit their hostel. This was a terrible injustice, no doubt, but it was one of a purely political kind. The right of students to beat each other rather than do research is absolutely fundamental to Indian democracy. American Universities have discriminated shamelessly against Indian students- like the great Lalit Modi- and expelled them for trivial reasons- e.g. kidnapping and beating a student in connection with a drug deal gone sour. The bias displayed by the Americans did not however prevent Lalit Modi, on his return to India, from making a great contribution to civilization. Why was Rohith prevented from making a similar contribution? The answer is he killed himself. Ironically, this desperate action of his may end up benefiting his mother and siblings- his brother, a 'Geoscientist', and his mother, a graduate, may get Government jobs- surely, an unusual outcome for a Student activist.

  Carl Sagan's widow writes- "If we could somehow quantify the totality of lost contributions and innovations as a result of prejudice, I believe we would find it staggering.'

  Prejudice, similar to that displayed by the American University to Lalit Modi, resulted in Rohith being censured, rather than celebrated, for some alleged beating or threatening behavior aimed at a rival. But, if student leaders don't beat each other who will? Do you think President Obama will send Marines to do the job? Will Angela Merkel suddenly descend from a cloud and start laying about her with her rolling pin? I am sorry, you have a very naive view of Late Capitalism if you continue to indulge in such day-dreams.

  Prejudice and Bias prevented Rohith from continuing to make a contribution to civilization by beating his fellow students. His suicide was a double tragedy- his no less brilliant peers lost a chance to contribute to civilization by beating him.

"Is it possible that the attention paid to Rohit’s story will lessen its chronic repetition? I am trying to find something hopeful in an otherwise heartbreaking example of needless suffering and squandered potential.'  
 Rohith's tragedy has highlighted the role of student organizations like the Communist SFI- which he accused of casteism- and the Ambedkar Students Association which is now dominant in his University thanks to an alliance with the SFI.

 “ASA, SFI, anything and everything exist for their own sake. Seldom the interest of a person and this organisation match. To get power, to become famous or to be important in between boundaries and to think we are up to changing the system. Very often we overestimate the acts and find solace in traits. Of course I must give my credit to both groups for making, introducing me to wonderful literature and people.” - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/the-11-lines-rohith-vemula-struck-off-suicide-note/#sthash.i7cLn1bT.dpuf

  Clearly, we should not feel any prejudice or bias against the ASA or the SFI just because they may appear to an untrained eye to have some sort of cognizable ideology but accept them as potentially equal to the Trinamool Youth Congress or even more disreputable Caste based Mafias.

  Vemula's death does have political implications quite separate from vindicating the inalienable right of PhD students to beat each other. These are

1) The wedge between Educationally Backward Classes and 'Dalit' Scheduled Castes. Vemula's father is OBC but his mother identifies as Dalit.  The same caste may be OBC in one State and S.C in another. On top of that, caste identities can be fluid. In this case, Vemula's mother was 'adopted' into the OBC caste of her husband but separated from him because of domestic violence. She raised her children in an exemplary fashion by her own efforts- her 'adoptive' mother, a highly educated woman, appears to have used her as a servant merely.
  Had Rohith brought a court case to claim the Dalit status of his mother (who was underage when married off), he might have won and established a valuable precedent.
   However, since Rohith entered in the General category, he could also fit the role of an OBC martyr, which is why his father now claims he was murdered by the Dalits. As a matter of fact, a modus vivendi is possible whereby Dalits claim Rohith for their propaganda abroad while the parties vying for the OBC vote claim him for their own in the domestic sphere.

2) The scandal that Govt. funded Universities feather-bed a class of student-politicians while the vast majority of students struggle to pay inflated fees for second rate instruction in private medical or engineering colleges.
 People like Vemula, who could have studied something worthwhile, received double the manufacturing wage to swan around repeating worthless Kancha Iliah type nonsense and either beating ineffectually or, more reprehensibly, not beating fellow students at all. When, for some reason, his monthly payments were delayed by red tape, he killed himself. This shows the bankruptcy of the student elite. Beating fellow students is a moral duty and healthful recreation, not something conditional on getting a hefty stipend. Incessantly repeating worthless nonsense is optional but this business of reading Carl Sagan (I've checked- it isn't porn at all) shows the low caliber of the fellow.

3) The student wing of the ruling party is licking its lips at the thought of capturing Rohith's University. The truth is the majority of students are Hindu and don't like Muslim terrorists and don't want to get a reputation as beef eating nihilists. Once Student Unions gain autonomy they will realize they can beat their fellow students with impunity and will do so with vim and vigor as part of their contribution to Civilization.

4) Indian youth has a choice between Hardik Patel and Rohith Vemula. Patel is in Jail- i.e. is enrolled at the most prestigious and best possible Research Institution concerned with 'making a contribution to Civilization'- whereas Rohith hanged himself after his stipend got held up. Older people like myself- who believe all these young fellows nowadays are Nancy boys simply- may take a dim view of the future. The day may come when our youth does not beat each other up with vim and vigor. Even the art of uttering obscene insults is declining. On my last visit to the village, I was distressed to see elderly men whose skulls had not been fractured by their hefty sons wielding agricultural implements. This is the main reason more and more Hindus are abandoning turban and flaunting their bald patches for all to see. Verily this is Kali Yuga.

Anwar M Shaikh's Magnum Opus

   Prof. Anwar Shaikh's magnum opus- 'Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crises'- is due out from O.U.P in February. This is a must read book for anyone with an interest in Political Economy.

  Unlike Piketty's famous tome, this is proper textbook presenting a Unified Theory of every aspect of the Economy without any reliance on standard assumptions of Utility Maximization, Perfect Competition, Rational Expectations and so on. This book has two great strengths
1) Shaikh is a superb scholar of Classical and 'heterodox' Economics- his exposition is magisterial and not tendentious in any way.
2) Shaikh has embraced the methods of 'Econophysics' and produces compelling empirical evidence for some truly innovative, indeed revolutionary, insights and predictions.

   Make no mistake- this is a path-breaking academic textbook but the author has worked very hard to express himself as clearly as possible so as to reach the intelligent layman who has no time for Academic point-scoring or Epistemological Methodenstreit.
   Shaikh is a very very bright guy who could easily dazzle us with his literary skills and encyclopedic knowledge of fashionable things like 'chaos' and 'turbulence'. But he simply isn't interested in celebrity status.
  He is a man of the Left- he volunteered to go teach in a school in Harlem in the late Sixties- and has been a Professor at the New School for many years. Yet he doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve or play the 'race' card. This is because his Theory is based on Reality and he wants us to use it to make things better.

  It may be objected that Marxism, nowadays, is represented by the likes of Varoufakis. It is a pose, a gimmick, nothing more. Shaikh's empirical and original theoretical work already attracts attention and gets incorporated in the models of the truly smart. But Marxism isn't about being smart its about 'attitude' and being entitled enough to indulge in 'retro' histrionics- thus Shaikh's book can't become a best-seller like Piketty's. All this may be true. However, the fact is, whether you are a young person choosing a career or a middle aged man worried about your pension, or a retired person wondering how much you can afford to gift away to your children, we all need to have a better model of what is going to happen in the Economy. Shaikh's book helps us do this.

Mein Kant- Chapter One- Rise of the Philosopher Penguin.

In 1963, as I later learnt from my Akka, a drunken penguin with delusions of grandeur escaped from the Bonn Zoo by pretending to be the new born child of a passing Tam Bram couple. Sadly, the penguin- though correctly predicting that Bonn would one day be ruled by a South Indian- had attached himself to the wrong family. In any case, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bonn's potential to become the seat of a more larcenous Fourth Reich greatly dwindled, which is why the penguin in question does not resent Herr Ashok Sridharan, the current Mayor of the latter City, too much.

Nevertheless, the above factum creates a scandal for a stare decisis Kantian Jurisprudence because the philosophical penguin's life-plan as conceived in 1963- i.e. well before Herr Sridharan's birth- would class with, for wrongly perceived as res judicata, uncontested Deduktionsschriften which- had the legitimacy of something like the Hague Concert of 1710 been prolonged in the manner Kant valorised- would have validated the following imputatio legis- 'It is the undersigned author, not any subsequent interloper with a South Indian name, who should be lording it over the Germans from their legitimate Capital City of Bonn and launching blitzkriegs against those bastard cousins of mine in Hampstead and T.Nagar and San Franfuckingcisco who still tease me for waddling around at weddings jutting out my belly which is like totally insensitive dude coz, let me tell you, for your kind information, it's no picnic being a flightless bird.'

The objection that some necessary imputatio facti is lacking for the above to hold is easily defeated by pointing out that I'm a fucking penguin dude. Qaestio juris can only be settled by me coz like fuck anybody else knows about what fucking law applies to fucking drunken penguins with South Indian names who were born in fucking Bonn? Get a grip.

Subramaniyam Swamy's 'Krishna' offer.

I thank God I've always been ugly, stupid, hateful or just plain barmy

The exact opposite in every way of Subramaniyam Swamy

Whose Vishnu is the colour of the winning vervet's Scrotum

Tho' but upaashruti is ergodicity's Kunti Totem.

Notes

1) Vervet monkeys have a lot of blue skin, but most of it is covered by fur, However, the male scrotum is hairless and the bright blue colour is visible from almost every angle, and is interesting to other males who come to examine it. Brain and Gartlan reported that when a male vervet falls in rank, the bright blue fades to a powdery blue or sometimes turns completely white. This colour change takes about two weeks. I enquired what the colour is due to, and was told there was a blue pigment in the skin. This seemed interesting as it might reflect a reaction of melanophores, possibly mediated by some hormonal change in the blood supply. John Price.

2) The word totem comes from the Ojibway word dodaem and means "brother/sister kin".

3) UPAaSRUTI. a supernatural voice which is heard at night revealing the secrets of the future.

4) Krishna- he whose skin is black. Kunti- biologically, she is the paternal aunt of Lord Krishna but was adopted into a different Royal family. Still, the Lord discharges his duty to his cousins in the affectionate manner of a maternal uncle. Nevertheless, he does not take sides- except by reason of omniscience and an overriding duty to protect humanity.

I'm the ugly child I was

Once again in the mirror, abashed, dismayed

See the trick Time, sudden, has played!

Now, as then, sore loved because

I'm the ugly child I was

All Surface is my Narcissus tomb
& Cain my Abel's nom de plume

Such Unanimity must Acquittal win

From, to, Sorrows' Sanhedrin

Saqi! Let Gemini breed in Liriope's womb
Wine to blooden, Christ to doom
So Love get drunk on Plato's Laws
I'm the ugly child I was.

Why India banned the 'Satanic Verses'.

Inder Malhotra has an article in the Express today about how and why India banned Salman Rushdie's controversial novel 'Satanic Verses'.

'Around the time Rushdie’s book was published, Rajiv Gandhi was being inundated with strong representations from Muslim leaders of all parties, including the Congress, protesting against horrendous anti-Muslim riots in Meerut, Hashimpura and adjoining areas in UP. During these, not only were the killings heavy but also some victims were blinded. The highly provocative movement for the construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya had aggravated the situation. It was in this grave atmosphere that a note, informing him that since Satanic Verses was not published in India, several applications for the import of Rushdie’s book also landed on the prime minister’s desk. He called in his information adviser, G. Parthasarathy, who advised that the matter should be referred to the Union home ministry that was responsible for what is officially always called “law and order” despite Nehru’s repeated suggestion that the phrase “peace and tranquility” would be better.

'A couple of days later the PM heard on Doordarshan that the import of Satanic Verses had been banned. Parthasarathy’s RAX phone rang and he found that the call was from the PM asking him whether he had seen the news on Doordarshan, and if so, how the ban order was announced. The answer was available immediately. C.G. Somiah, then a highly-spoken-of home secretary, explained that under the government’s rules of business, it was his duty to deal with every major problem concerning law and order. On reading Rushdie’s book in its entirety, he added, he came to the conclusion that to allow it to be circulated in India in the existing law and order situation would be not only wrong but also dangerous. The home ministry issued the necessary orders. Rajiv evidently thought that this was the end of the matter.'

There are two points which can be made in this connection.

1) The political background was irrelevant. Rushdie's book wasn't connected to either anti-Muslim atrocities in U.P nor had anything to do with Ayodhya. The fact is a prominent opposition M.P, former diplomat, Syed Shahabudin had written an open letter calling for the book's import to be banned. By itself, this meant that no application for its import could be granted without ascertaining if prima facie it was noxious under the relevant act and, moreover, if it posed a threat to internal security.



2) The decision to ban or allow the import of a book is not made at the level of the Prime Minister. If the Home Ministry receives representations opposing the import of a book, it makes a decision based on certain objective criteria. These can be challenged in a court of law. However, it would still be open to anyone to approach the Court to ban the book and order copies destroyed on some other basis- in this case Hate Speech Law Section 295(A)- which was brought in after the scandal caused by the publication of 'Rangila Rasul', a book which was reminiscent of the Satanic Verses because of the inclusion of salacious material in connection with episodes in the life of the Prophet of Islam. Indeed, that's why Khushwant Singh, who trained as a lawyer, advised Penguin India not to publish the book.


This raises the question of Rushdie's open letter to Rajiv Gandhi- which the author now admits was 'cheeky' and 'arrogant, not to say hilariously ignorant- Rushdie called Khurshid Alam Khan an extremist and a fundamentalist!- and the dilemma faced by a democratic country under the rule of law when attacked by so-called 'public intellectuals' who affect not to know the Law and who pretend that Politicians are all powerful.


Rushdie wrote as follows to Rajiv Gandhi- 

'A further official statement was brought to my notice. This explained that ''The Satanic Verses'' had been banned as a pre-emptive measure. Certain passages had been identified as susceptible to distortion and misuse, presumably by unscrupulous religious fanatics and such. The banning order had been issued to prevent this misuse. Apparently, my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good!

This really is astounding. It is as though, having identified an innocent person as a likely target for assault by muggers or rapists, you were to put that person in jail for protection. This is no way, Mr. Gandhi, for a free society to behave.

The Indian Govt had been kind to Rushdie. Rather than saying baldly that the book contravened Hate Speech Law Section 295 (A) and that its import had been banned in consequence, the bureaucrats sought to give Rushdie a fig leaf. The fact is, quite soon after, the British Police had to take Rushdie into hiding for his own protection. By then, of course, even Rushdie could see that such a measure was necessary to preserve his life. What is alarming is that a man born in India and who had lived in Pakistan could not understand that his book provided material for Islamophobes as well as serving as a pretext for mob violence by Muslim activists. Rushdie could scarcely have been unaware that mobs in Pakistan had burned down the British Council Library because of a tasteless joke by Auberon Waugh about the birth of the future Messiah and the peculiar shape of the trousers men wore in the region. In the twenty succeeding years, Political Islam had gained rather than retreated. Yet Rushdie wrote a scabrous book and expected to be taken seriously as a Public Intellectual- one, moreover, as he reminded us in a pompous TV interview he gave at that time, who had studied Islamic History in Cambridge.


Rushdie does offer a possible legal defense relevant to a prosecution under Section 295. Here it is-

'The section of the book in question (and let's remember that the book isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay) deals with a prophet - who is not called Mohammed - living in a highly fantastical city made of sand (it dissolves when water falls upon it).

'He is surrounded by fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own first name. Moreover, this entire sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at that. How much further from history could one get?

'In this dream sequence I have tried to offer my view of the phenomenon of revelation and the birth of a great world religion; my view is that of a secular man for whom Islamic culture has been of central importance all his life.'

This defence could work if the reader could believe that the crazy movie star could himself have had the hallucination narrated. An American or German might think, 'okay, maybe Indian movie stars from humble backgrounds grew up listening to stories about their Religion similar to what is depicted in the book. Indian Judges, on the other hand, have direct access to the vernacular traditions re. the Prophet. Furthermore, the prosecution could call actual Muslim film stars from humble backgrounds and establish that the hallucinations Rushdie fathers on his protagonist are not such as might arise as a result of mental illness. Rather, they are meant to impress the reader as a type of Revelation.

 
Rushdie refers to Hazrat Salman Farsi- a special hero to Ajamis (non Arabs). Why on earth does he conflate this impeccable character with the reviled Ibn Sarh who was not Ajami? Would Rushdie have uttered a similar slur on Hazrat Bilal (who was Black)?

 
The problem here, from the legal point of view, is that a lot of Rushdie's writing is of a low grade 'scenes a fair' type, which, though a defense against the charge of plagiarism, is no good at all for a plea basing itself on aesthetic value or scholarly integrity.

Rushdie said- 

'When Syed Shahabuddin and his fellow self-appointed guardians of Muslim sensibilities say that ''no civilized society'' should permit the publication of a book like mine, they have got things backwards. The question raised by the book's banning is precisely whether India, by behaving in this fashion, can any more lay claim to the title of a civilized society.'

A Civilized Society is one under the Rule of Law. In India, Democratically elected Legislatures had approved or extended Laws against Hate Speech.

 
Banning Rushdie's book was the Civilized thing to do for the Indian bureaucrat concerned because it was enjoined by a Democratically enacted Law and was clearly in the Public Interest. Protesting against an unjust law or seeking to redefine the Public Interest is equally, if not more so, incumbent on members of Civil Society. However, there are civilized ways of enforcing or protesting Laws. Indian bureaucrats did their duty in banning a book but did so in a Civilized manner such that the least possible damage was done to the author's reputation. Rushdie, by contrast, though adopting an Olympian tone, protested the ban in the least civilized manner possible- viz. by telling stupid lies and putting forward obviously fallacious arguments. The proper way to change the Law is to bring a test case on a genuinely worthwhile piece of literature. Sadly, Rushdie is yet to produce anything that meets that description.

Alan Gibbard, Semantic Normativity & Ontological dysphoria

Economics was once known as the 'dismal science'- its study appeared to hold little utility other than in salutarily lowering expectations and reconciling the productive classes to a miserabilist horizon.

Then, during the Second World War, some young Americans, not from established elites, got a chance to use their mathematical or analytical talents to redirect or even boost domestic production as well as to improve military tactics and strategy. What they were doing wasn't something wholly new- in the past, highly experienced men with 'expert cognition' had developed heuristics, some of which had been given a mathematical treatment. This time, however, Pure Mathematics had reached a critical mass such that exponential development in some fields- e.g. Turing's Enigma or Von Neumann's Los Alamos- completely altered the horizon in every other in a mutually intelligible manner.

Thus, after the war, though the contribution of women was still not acknowledged- indeed, historically, Economics has been the most misogynistic of the Social Sciences- the WASP establishment had to retreat in the face of some extraordinarily brilliant and prolific, often working class or refugee, Jewish scholars whose social optimism went hand in hand with a willingness to recast the foundations of their discipline on terms as rigorous as Mathematical Physics in the assurance that this would unleash human productivity in a manner more unequivocally positive than the Manhattan Project's splitting of the atom.

Rising prosperity during the Fifties and even into the Sixties, led to a completely altered public perception of the Scientific status of Economics. There followed a golden age, culminating in a Nobel prize being created for what had become, by default, the Queen of the Social Sciences, if not Philosophy's young and as yet promising Regent.

But this dizzying apotheosis was swiftly followed by a dramatic reversal of fortune- the 'Stagflation' of the Seventies- featuring a dialogue of the deaf between Keynesians and Monetarists, while Hayekians and Marxists prowled around like hyenas picking off the wounded- which brought Economics into secular disrepute but did so at precisely the time when advances in Information Technology and Dynamic Programming- as well as the increasing availability of 'big data'- had the potential to put flesh on an empirical, evolved under uncertainty, regret-minimizing, Mathematical Skeleton quite different from the Utility Maximizing Adam Kadmon of Arrow and Samuelson and Hurwicz and Baumol.

However, the ghastly interregnum between Economists pretending they were Physicists and Physicists steamrolling over Economics was not without its own landmarks such as the Gibbard-Satterthwaite and Myerson-Satterthwaite theorems which link mechanism design to evolutionary biology in an illuminating manner such that we realize Preference Revelation is not a hurdle to be surpassed but something Evolution has baked in to ensure enough hedging against uncertainty obtains. This is not to say that faith in a 'Revelation Principle'- i.e. the belief that if an outcome can be implemented by an arbitrary 'black box' mechanism, then it can also be implemented by a white box mechanism based on true preferences- might not be Muth Rational- i.e. something all agents are better off affirming.

Alan Gibbard- who first articulated this principle- is not however now an Economist but rather a glittering gem in the diadem of Academic Philosophy- a discipline which has suffered an even more radical depreciation in general esteem. He argues- following Kripke- that 'claims as to what something means are normative claims.' In other words, he refutes the notion that meaning is something objective- the solution to a coordination problem- which can be discovered by a purely alethic process- e.g. looking up words in a dictionary or working out the Schelling focal point or solving for the constrained optimum on a Social Welfare function. Rather, meaning is the instantaneous change in the action set brought about by its own acceptance. If this 'instantaneous change' accords with Gibbard's 'Revelation Principle'- so useful in incentive compatibility and mechanism design- then there is some point of view from which Gibbard's 'meaning of meaning' is also the solution to a coordination problem. If, however, people have an incentive to lie to themselves- perhaps to escape a computational cost or to baffle a parasite or predator which, otherwise, would be able to predict their behavior- then we have some Newcomb's problem or Kavka toxin type reason for believing this might not be the case.

Philosophically, one may still doubt whether 'lying to oneself' is meaningful. One method of circumventing this problem is to say that people may have a preferred ontology which is not at home in this world and so their truth-makers express ontological dysphoria, which- in Gibbard's system- could be called action states.

Consider what happens when two people meet up and first of all both agree that 'mutually beneficial trade is a good thing', and then one of them goes on to say 'the previous statement has a practical meaning- viz. you ought to trade me that pen you are not using in return for this calculator that I've no need for'.
I suppose the other could retort- 'The Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem suggests otherwise!' and that would be a 'knock down' argument.
In practice, the other party may refuse a transaction of the sort outlined above out of an obscure sense that in an uncertain future he may regret the transaction. The problem is, his interlocutor may say, or feel, that this agent is being a 'meanie'. Moreover, this interlocutor may refuse, at a later point, a univocally beneficial trade simply to 'punish' the meanie. In other words, there are hysteresis effects and reputational problems here which complicate things. 'Cheap talk' is being turned into a 'Costly signal' by an illicit mechanism.

Gibbard gives a philosophical defense against this sort of illicit mechanism but, unlike the Myserson-Satterthwaite proof (which links up with real world behavior under uncertainty in a fruitful manner such that new types of assets or exchanges can be mutually agreed) it is not intended to be categorical.
As he tells 3AM- 'The obvious approach to the meaning of meaning claims, though, is to try to define the concept of meaning in naturalistic terms, in terms that can fit into a purely empirical science. A central question for me, then, is why I reject treating meaning as a concept within a purely empirical science.
'As early reviewers of the book point out, I’m rather perfunctory on this question. I don’t come up with a knock-down argument that analyses in scientific terms won’t capture the meaning of meaning claims. In a way I don’t want to: as I say at one point in the book, I’m not convinced that treating the concept of meaning as a normative concept will be the most illuminating way to approach the theory of meaning'
Thus Gibbard on Normativity isn't like Myerson-Satterthwaite in settling an argument once and for all. Rather any hoped for similarity would lie in the fruitful avenues of further exploration which are opened up. At Gibbard says- 'A chief aim of the book is to try to show how fruitful a normative approach can be in identifying what might be at issue in questions of meaning.' 
Since most people find the math used in the Myserson-Satterthwaite proof a bit daunting- though, once grasped, it immediately suggests new and useful approaches- it would be great if there were a simple meaning to Gibbard's thesis, more especially as he tells us it would be fruitful.

Take the following dicta, as quoted by Tim Williamson-
1) 'The meanings of the words in a sentence combine to explain which inferential oughts apply to the sentence and the evidential conditions under which one ought to accept or reject the sentence. A word’s meaning what it does consists in the pattern of oughts that enters into such explanations. (p. 114)
The emphasis on explanation makes this seem a functionalist view of Semantics from a Normative perspective- not a Semantic Normativity. As such, it might encourage us to equate Game Theory with meta-ethics. However, this is not at all Gibbard's view.

2) ‘The point of normative claims is to tie in conceptually with action’ (p. 227).
 For example, ‘I can’t consistently believe I ought right now to leave my burning building and decide to stay. Naturalistic thoughts, in contrast, lack this conceptual tie to action’ (p. 224). 
As Tim Williamson points out, Gibbard's agent who thinks 'I ought to leave my burning building' has to distinguish whether this is a naturalistic thought or a normative claim. Only in the latter case does he actually have to leave the building. One way of making sense of this is to say that there is a Bayesian process going on. If you often have the thought 'gotta get out of this burning building' and you never do and nothing bad happens then, probably, there was no Gibbardian normative claim there at all. You just take too many drugs or else the fire alarm keeps going off and you have a vivid imagination or something of that sort.

3) This is Gibbard's reflection on Kripe's classic passage re. Meaning as Normativity-

Kripke  actually said 'what I intend to mean'- i.e. this was a hypothetical not a categorical imperative- but this does not alter Gibbard's point which is that normativity always has a conceptual tie to action.

 As readers of this blog may remember, I have previously argued that 'the other side of Hume's Guillotine is that belief in an 'ought' causes us to arbitrarily restrict the domain of what 'is'.
Gibbard, links the action space of an agent with Normativity. If ontological dysphoria is an action then Normativity is its high road because of the conceptual tie between thought and action Gibbard posits. Thus every admitted 'ought' leaves us less at home in the world.

Could Gibbard's first sentence, quoted above, bear the interpretation I have just put on it? Perhaps Meaning is Normative in the sense of mapping to changes in the agent's degree and type of ontological dysphoria- i.e. being a function of the mismatch between her ex post conceptual action space and that associated with the ex ante Bayesian-Nash semantic equilibrium- and this is fruitful in that we can now understand semantic processes as being like Newcombe problems with Kavka toxins releasing or damning up capacitance diversity on a high uncertainty landscape.

Alternatively, we can think of the conceptual thought-action tie peculiar to  Gibbard's system as analogous to his Revelation Principle because consistent discrimination of naturalistic from normative statements is a sequential equilibrium. However, in at least one case- viz. where regret minimization is incentive incompatible- his meaning of meaning may be gamed in an ontologically dysphoric manner such that mere Meta-Metaphoricity is its own bilateral context. Thus meta-ethics has no privileged diegesis nor intensional langue nor ideal type parole.