How Did Clive Bell, One of Keynes’s Bloomsberry Artist Friends, Become a Recognized Expert on Keynes's a Treatise on Probability, given that He Had No Knowledge of Mathematical Logic, Statistics, Probability or Boolean Algebra?

Abstract

Clive Bell was an artist.There is no possible way that Clive Bell could have understood/advised Keynes about material appearing in his 1921 A Treatise on Probability or have had any understanding of the roles that intuition and perception played in Keynes’s logical theory of probability unless he had been a rated tournament chess player who understood the important role of intuition and perception, a role that could only be grasped by someone who has actually played Over-The-Board (OTB) tournament chess under time constraint (a clock). The belief that Clive Bell’s recollections/memories about his friendship with Keynes encompass a knowledge of Keynes’s logical theory of probability or Keynes’s concept of the role of intuition in decision making under time constraint are simply nonsense. Bell has been cited in work done by C. MIsak in 2020, that is related to her biography on Frank Ramsey, whose subjective theory of probability was regarded by Keynes as a academic exercise that had very limited applicability in the real world of messy, unclear, ambiguous decision making and in tournament chess, although there is a role for Ramsey’s blunt force approach in Correspondence (Postal) Chess. The failure to understand the relevance of the role of the time constraint in decision making is at pandemic levels in the academic fields of history, philosophy, psychology, economics, political science and decision theory. Consider the following claim made by R. Skidelsky, a historian: “Keynes’s people are thinkers, and he equips them with the tools of thought: logic. Ramsey’s people are actors and he equips them with the tools of action: calculating power.” Skidelsky,1992,pp.71-72). Keynes correctly realized that such calculating power is very rarely used in an OTB tournament chess game. It primarily occurs in opening play and/or in a situation where one player has prepared in advance an innovation (new move) that requires his opponent to be able to avoid a forcing line or lose. Keynes’s decision makers are thinkers who analyze the position on the board using their intuition to perceive the fundamental dynamic elements of the position. It is impossible to make any specific calculation. Ramsey’s decision makers are memorizers who are looking to calculate forced lines OTB that usually do not exist. A rare exception is the following game where memorization and calculating power come into play: White:Towne (USCF -1750) Black: Brady (USCF-1850) - August, 2007 (La Palma Chess Club, Calif., USA) 1)e4 g6 2)d4 c5 3)Nf3 cxd4 4)Nxd4 Bg7 5)Nc3 Qa5 6) Bc4? Qc5! 7)Bxf7 + KxBf7 -/+ and White resigned in forty moves, although he could have resigned at move 6.