One thing I have always thought was missing in game theory (and it is probably there but I just haven't looked hard enough) is a mathematical framework for how to build trust to increase the infinite payout for everyone. If in the decision making the idea of an offering is added in then it brings up the possibility of gauging trust and building trust so that future actions can capture more value until an optimal infinite policy is attained. So, for instance, I look at all my possible options and I choose one based on how much I trust the other party AND how much I want to increase that trust in the future. So I give them an offering, select an option that gives them a little more but at a cost to me, to prove that I am willing to increase trust. If they reciprocate then I loose nothing and the next offering can be bigger. If they don't then I gained knowledge and my next offering is smaller. Basically, this is like tit for tat but over time and intended to get to the optimal solution instead of the min max solution. Clearly I'm not a mathematician, but I bet this could be refined to exact equations and formalized so that exact offerings could be calculated.
Loving the blog in both style and content, hope to have time to read more in the future!
A random note in case Non-Zero-Sum James is looking: It's frustrating that reading footnotes[0] requires scrolling back and finding your previous place. A link from the footnote back to the original place in the text or something that reveals a footnote in-place (e.g. on hover) is fairly universal and very helpful!
Wow!. Such an original piece of "non-AI slop" content in a long time. Kudos for making this as I myself tipping my toes to explore this concept after hearing about it from multiple sources(Naval Ravikant incl). Thanks for making this and looking forward to more podcast episodes. Cheers
The article on "effortocracy"[1] is pretty very well done. Quoting the end of the article:
"... if you take anything away from this, it is to recognise that if meritocracy is based on achievement only, then we must be sure not to confuse it with effortocracy when it comes to its moral weight."
Related reading: The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel (I was hoping the article would reference this, and it does.)
I don't think we actually want an effortocracy. Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement? There's no inherent moral worth to futile effort that doesn't actually yield any reward, regardless of how laborious it might be.
This is further complicated by the difference between direct and indirect value. I build a thing that produces n value and is directly attributable to me. I also do things that help 100 others produce 10% more value themselves but most of that is attributed to themselves producing 10 * n value overall. How will I be rewarded if at all? Most likely as someone who produced n value.
This is the inherent friction of most overly “scientific” management systems. A decent line manager is aware of who on their team lifts up the team with glue & peer acceleration type soft work.
Systems that try to get too “objective” fail to recognize this as most KPIs are on direct outcomes that are easy to measure, though often less important.
No joke I once worked at a company with multi-category numeric ratings that then rolled up to a total rating score that had 2 decimal places of precision.
Because you need effort + the ability to create value, not one or the other. Some people have one but not the other and seek out help to bridge the gap.
Yes, also effort is something a person can influence directly, while ability cannot or only indirectly (education ...) so it makes sense to focus on things people can influence, but but achievement is the ultimate target.
To strong-man their argument, they don't seem to be arguing to reward effort only, in their words:
> "To truly measure and reward by an effortocratic measure we need both a top-down and bottom-up approach
- At the top, reward people who have overcome more to get to the same point
- At the bottom, level the playing field so that potential, wherever it is, can be realised"
The way I think of it is using a vector analogy. They're arguing that a meritocracy only reward the end point, and that instead we should value both the magnitude of the vector in addition to its end point. You're interpreting effortocracy (not unfairly IMO) as only rewarding the magnitude of the vector, which is indeed absurd.
In my opinion however, they themselves are straw-manning what they point to as "moral meritocracy". As I understand it, their main gripe is that achievements are not only rewarded, but also ascribed higher moral weight, which is plain false. People vastly prefer rag-to-riches story to born-rich ones. So much so that you have many rich people straight up lying about their origin stories to make it sound more rag-to-riches than it is.
Edit: removed last bit that was harsher than intended.
Well, i would say that there are two common fallacies w.r.t. meritocracy:
1) Mixing up merit (ability to provide achievement) with effort.
2) Assuming it has anything to do with moral weight. While it primarily targets just decision making and distribution of deserts (rewards).
Why distribution of deserts should be meritocratic? Because that ensure that collaboration is positive-sum for everybody involved. Considering this, fair reward for participation in some group effort has to satisfy a condition that reward is at least as large as a missed opportunity (of collaborating in some other group, individually, or not collaborating at all).
Just aesthetically one of the worst websites I have ever seen.
It is obviously impossible to engage with every single idea proposed at once, but I think the main thrust of the argument is encapsulated in
>"Personally, I feel like the world might be a happier, more cooperative place if situations were by default framed as Stag Hunts."
Which is just so bizarrely and obviously false. Especially when just sentences before the issue of climate change came up, which certainly is not a positive sum game and we would be lucky if it was a zero sum game, but given all evidence it is very obviously a negative sum game, where governments get to talk about who has to bear the most pain. (And it isn't clear that cooperation even is the best opportunity for survival)
The optimism strikes me as so blindingly naive that it makes it hard to take anything said seriously. Maybe this is just a generational divide, many of the older people I know, in their 40s or older, seem much more optimistic about the state of the world. And the attempt to justify affirmative action is just so bizarre. If historic grievances are legitimate arguments for preferential treatment, then you will never get me to accept that this is anything but a brutal race to the bottom, which is about who can make the other suffer most. No, the world is not a positive sum game and I will never live under the delusion that it is.
The only way for cooperation to be a winning strategy in a prisoner's dilemma is if people have memory/reputation/trust. However, that is very difficult to build in the modern digital world where everyone is a faceless username.
Capitalism is 100% a zero sum game and capitalists love to try to pretend that it’s not
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
>The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
The article explicitly addresses this:
The fact that Capitalism is non-zero-sum doesn't mean it is necessarily positive-sum. An economy that gets out of balance can produce very negative results (which are still non-zero). Cons of capitalism: — Can not be relied on to provide adequate social services, including healthcare and education. — Can be expected to run at a cost to externalities like the environment. — Can produce products that are detrimental to well-being.
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.
you’re sitting here saying “this person addressed it” and I’m saying no they didn’t.
They are entirely misguided and ignorant about this argument and you’re taking it as though it’s a reasonable argument because apparently you’re also ignorant about this argument
it’s entirely wrong and is at best a naïve capitalist propaganda interpretation with absolutely no grounding in history
There are literally dozens of philosophers who have tomes of more research on this going back to the 16th and 17th centuries that demonstrably show that what we call capitalism is definitionally zero sum
All you have to do is go read proudhon what is property chapter 4
I'm replying without having read the entirety of the text you've referred to by Proudhon, but it looks interesting—thanks.
Some raw thoughts of mine if I may (feel free to add seasoning):
You mention that capitalism is definitionally zero-sum, and you seem to be facing quite a bit of resistance. I've had similar thoughts (perhaps still premature) that capitalism is zero-sum, but only (?) under a strong definition of "zero". I've not fleshed out my thoughts completely, but I suspect there are intangible/abstract dimensions along which we maintain some kind of equilibrium, regardless of what we do. "Do" here is quite abstract, but as a first approximation in the realm of economics, it might refer to any act of investment, compensation, or labour. (I may be abusing some technical terms in economics here—not my home turf.) A separate question could then emerge as to how significant these intangible/abstract dimensions are.
Actually, I'm not even sure that this is specific to the context of capitalism. However, whether something is a zero-sum game would seem relevant to systems obsessed with objective quantification, and where that quantification is heavily involved in steering moral views (or decision making), and I view capitalism as one of them.
It’s definitely not specific to the context of capitalism
capitalism however makes transactionalism the explicit structure such that it cannot coexist with any other type of ownership regime by function
That is to say, if you look at anarcho socialist philosophy it can theoretically coexist with other philosophies inside the same state and action space
Historically however, we have not found a stable equilibrium for the lived reality of our experience such that we could map it cleanly onto some discreet and identified philosophical framework
So neither anarcho-socialism nor capitalism is a sustainable equilibrium point due to the constraints of a human biological substrate
Claiming that “it could” or “can” or “is the best we can do” are all beside the point, because they ignore the intractable fundamental fact of separating human systems from all other systems
Every possible game is zero sum because the universe isn’t creating more matter or energy, it’s just moving around. How we move it around is the problem to solve and anyone using weak justifications with bankrupt epistemological foundations is just wasting everyone’s time.
I don't believe capitalism is a zero sum game. Capitalism is not the holy grail, but when combined with laws that balance the uneven distribution of the wealth it _creates_, and laws that protect resources and cleanliness, it turns out it is the best system we as a human species employed so far. I'm open to be proven wrong.
By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion
Like this is the entire history of capitalism and it’s not even close
the fact that other organizations (USSR, China) do the same thing (horde property and then use consolidated resources to enforce economic heirarchy) but don’t call it capitalism doesn’t make it any less true
They can say “communism” all day but if the functional properties of the system of the Russian Federation or CCP are that Property control is limited to a small group of elites who then use those resources to create a command economy that is purely capitalist philosophy.
The hording and eliteness is not a property of the capitalistic system. It might be an unwanted side effect. Imperialism, greed, urge to expand control, subordination of others are unfortunately human traits. You might attribute that behavior to any system, why single out capitalism?
Because capitalism explicitly encodes transactionalism into the social structure by alienating labor from the fruits of the labor.
There’s no period of time where that has not been true for some portion is society, but we reached a point to which there are no places where that is not true.
If you read Prudhon thoroughly you’ll understand that his critique is that the entire concept of capitalism is based on the concept of property (undisputed) and the concept of property is an entirely made up mythical thing (disputed)
That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.
Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe
Nothing is free
energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process
No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that
Let's stop at the first half. If I pay somebody to dig a ditch. Period. End of story. Let's assume I'm not clinically insane and I actually needed that ditch for something. Is the sum still zero?
Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible.
Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero?
You’re describing positive-sum outcomes in subjective preference space.
I’m describing conservation laws in physical state space.
Preference gains don’t violate thermodynamics, but they also don’t escape zero-sum reality once you include energy, ecology, and time.
You’re doing what I’m complaining about separating Economics from ecology - there’s a very firm reason why climate changes the most important topic of our decade is because we have to merge our lived experience with the work experience and kill this embedded dualism that somehow human environments are different than the rest of the universe.
It’s like you’re trying to do control theory without energy constraints.
Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum.
We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.
The sum doesn't have to be zero.
And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.
> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain
Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.
Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?
Humans can’t convert sun energy into biological energy. We aren’t plants.
However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not?
Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange?
There’s no free lunch
Human activity takes from the non-human environment.
Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically
Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation
I personally found the text hard to read (both because of the typeface and the small size), the animations distracting during scrolling (while I'm trying to skim the content), and the background colors too dark for dark text on them with jarring full white (#FFF) colored text.
I understand they're trying to go for a whimsical and fun feeling, but imo as implemented it is far from "really well made".
Lots of interesting insights, but their affirmative action take is a miss.
> Critics of affirmative action often commit the fallacy of letting a failure in one area doom the entire enterprise. This ignores the interdependent nature of affirmative action. [1]
Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics. The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process. You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks, and anonymous interviews having higher rates of hire and such.
Due to this, people considered affirmative actions to correct for this skew. That would actually make it a meritocratic motivated AA.
And then you have the idea of missed potential. Those who weren't given the opportunity to develop, it limits the pool of exceptional candidates. It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process, but we were artificially limiting those with potential. The challenge is bigger here, so you need a bootstrapping process, because you're faced with a chicken and egg situation. You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect. I admit that this is the more controversial one, as it means temporarily favoring disadvantaged groups to bootstrap things. I just wanted to point out that there's a meritocratic angle to it as well.
Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.
Do you disagree that some critics of AA are committing that fallacy?
AA is being used as an example of the failure mode where:
"The failure of a single component does not mean the program is fatally flawed; rather, it highlights the need for a comprehensive, coordinated approach"
Indeed, I'm sure the author would agree that part of the comprehensive solution is to increase the amount of university admission slots.
That feels more like a cop-out than a legitimate criticism of a fallacy.
If the author could propose an affirmative action program that didn’t have that “single component” at the core of how it operates then I’d be more interested in the argument, but as-is it just feels like an attempt to forcefully ignore valid criticisms.
> Do you disagree that some critics of AA are committing that fallacy?
This is is such a weird non-argument dressed as some gotcha. "Some critics of x are committing y fallacy" is probably universally correct statement. It is so devoid of any meaning that this particular type of discourse has not only a name, but a mascot too.
I certainly claim that almost nobody "commits" that "fallacy" and that it is not a remotely notable viewpoint in the civic discourse of any country I know about.
No doubt in a world of 8 billion people, there exists someone, somewhere, who has for some reason voiced the belief described - i.e. that if institutions really heavily based their selection of applicants on skin color rather than merit, that would be good, but that because in reality institutions have only been convinced to somewhat compromise on merit-based selection in favour of skin-color-based selection, it's bad, and should thus be abandoned completely in favour of total meritocracy. But that belief would really be rather odd, and I have never seen it expressed even once in my entire life.
Nor am I convinced, despite its oddness, that it is properly considered to contain a fallacy! After all, sometimes it really is the case, for various reasons, that some endeavour is only worth doing if total success can be achieved, and not worth the downsides if you can only succeed partially. No doubt if someone really held the allegedly fallacious view described, they would believe affirmative action is exactly such an endeavour and be able to explain why!
I was more thrown off by their definition of "Coordination Problems" than anything. They say:
> We sometimes run into problems where a number of factors have to be addressed simultaneously in order for them to be effective at all. One weak link can ruin it for the rest. These are called Coordination Problems.
Coordination problems are about multiple actors choosing interdependent outcomes, rather than a problem that needs everything to be done right. This sounds more like a "Weakest Link" problem than a coordination problem.
Not that it invalidates the rest of the post, but it did make me dig in more into the person's background and showed that they're more of a journalist than a game theory expert.
> Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics.
I wish I could find the source, but the vast majority of universities don't have a fixed admissions quota. They are criteria based (if you meet the criteria, you get in). In principle, AA admissions did not prevent others from getting a seat.
Of course, it's possible the general admissions criteria is raised slightly to compensate, but again - for most universities, AA admissions wasn't a significant number, and however much the bar raised, it was likely minuscule.
I'll be blunt. Everyone I've personally known who didn't get admissions in a particular university and blamed AA for it was trying to get into a top school, and likely didn't earn his spot.
Are you assuming elite college admission counts are rigid in the count of people admitted because of real teaching constraints or reducing the supply of prestige?
I think something that often isn't considered with affirmative action is the benefits that are conferred to the people who are not in a minority. In other words it is a genuinely useful thing to go to a university with a broad spectrum of people and ideas.
In a purely meritocratic sense, all other beings equal a university that provides a diverse faculty and student body will better educate its students than a university that doesn't, all other things remaining equal.
The problem in practice is that these programs don’t actually select for diverse ideas, they select for demographic traits like gender or ethnic background.
If the team uses relational databases but someone shows up to an interview with a strongly held belief that NoSQL is the way to go, they’re likely to be rejected because their ideas don’t match the team’s. Same if the team strongly believes in some version of agile but a person they interview doesn’t like agile. Diversity programs in practice never even attempt to push diversity of ideas, they ignore all of that and focus on things like gender and ethnic background.
This feels like a dangerous opinion to voice, but the workplace affirmative action programs I’ve seen in practice have been very poor in their implementation. At my last workplace that instituted diversity targets, HR would just start rejecting hires if they thought it would skew the diversity numbers in the wrong way. So you’d hit a wall where the only candidates you were allowed to hire couldn’t be, for example, men or of Asian descent or some other demographic trait they thought was over-represented. None of this improved diversity of ideas, it became a game to find a person whose ideas matched the team who also happened to have the right gender or skin color to keep our diversity statistics going in the direction HR demanded.
>The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
A lot of proponents of affirmative action will agree with this. They'll explicitly acknowledge that people admitted under AA will be underqualified, due to factors mentioned in the article:
[Minorities] may lack foundational skills (taken for granted in more affluent households and schools) and therefore might require breaks from study, which can lead to dropping out. They might have developed unhelpful habits or attitudes formed in teen years, or a sense of identity tied up with being part of a historically maligned group, affecting confidence and performance. [Affirmative action] does nothing to address these factors.
Said proponents would agree that AA is a failure if assessed strictly by these criteria. However, they would then go on to say that the benefits conferred by an elite education to the current crop of AA beneficiaries lead to future generations of minorities being less likely to experience the aforementioned issues, so after accounting for all future externalities, AA is a net good. As Justice O'Connor famously wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) [0],
It would be a sad day indeed, were America to become a quota-ridden society, with each identifiable minority assigned proportional representation in every desirable walk of life. But that is not the rationale for programs of preferential treatment; the acid test of their justification will be their efficacy in eliminating the need for any racial or ethnic preferences at all. […] It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education [California v. Bakke (1978)]. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
That said, it's been almost 25 years since she wrote that (and 50 years since California v. Bakke), and it's debatable whether those future externalities have manifested.
And many against affirmative action will agree that there have been massive historical injustices for certain demographics that have lingering effects. The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.
>The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.
Yup. Though there is a third option: completely ignore the meritocracy vs. equity zero-sum game and simply argue that demographic-based weighting of applicants is an ineffective way to rectify those historical injustices. It is treating a symptom, not the underlying disease.
> simply argue that demographic-based weighting of applicants is an ineffective way to rectify those historical injustices. It is treating a symptom, not the underlying disease.
Is there any effective way to rectify them or the underlying disease that you'd recommend?
But those resources are already redistributed (from a distribution that somewhat aligns with demographics) with things like personal relationships (think legacy admissions or a father's buddy handshake internship). AA is meant to correct historical instances of this which snowball into familial / generational wealth and (most difficult to diffuse) social capital that was distributed unfairly.
That's the argument for it, not my belief. The argument for AA is that the so-called meritocracy had/has its own unequal distributions.
>AA is meant to correct historical instances of this which snowball into familial / generational wealth and (most difficult to diffuse) social capital that was distributed unfairly.
If that was the case it would be based on family wealth/income.
Social capital is not measured in family wealth / income, but it can very easily translate into jobs and other valuable things (like when your father knows someone who can get you an interview)
I went to a school in the suburbs with kids from middle class families and lower-middle class families. Many of us wanted to get into the Ivy League schools, but what I saw was that, presumable because of AA, the middle class kids from over-represented minorities (Asian, white) did not get into the Ivies, and the 1 or 2 who did get in were middle class kids from under-represented minorities (Black, Hispanic). But their families were still pretty well-off. Under no circumstances did a kid from a lower-middle class family make it into an Ivy, regardless of race. I really don't get why AA has to be about race, if we just did AA based on parental income alone, I would support it 100%. I think most concervatives would be happy because it wouls support poor whites, and most liberals would also be happy because it would in actuality URMs would still be the most benefited because they are the majority of low-income families. My only assumption is that it doesn't leave any openings for the rich and powerful to game the system, so people with the power to make changes will never make that change.
I think a major flaw of all these models is that they underestimate:
1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.
2. How forgiving people are and how tolerant they are to deception, abuse and immorality. I hate to say it but a lot of people are attracted to abusers. They keep going back to the same kinds of people who will abuse them over and over. These same people who tolerate abuse often seem to show disrespect and look down on good, honest people. I cannot overstate how powerful this effect is; and it seems to be getting worse over time! And these people keep coming up with narratives to gaslight themselves about their abusers "they're not so bad"... People will especially do this when their abuser has power over them (Stockholm Syndrome).
Once you factor these two things, cheating is the clear winning strategy. By a mile... It's objectively a superior strategy. If we just follow game theory; it will take us somewhere really dark. Game theory isn't what's keeping the world civilized. Society literally all rests on people's irrational emotions and moral principles.
The desire to do the right thing is completely irrational and is a net loss to the individual. If we continue with the current system and current assumptions, all moral individuals will be wiped out because they are at a HUGE disadvantage. To solve our social problems, we need to be more moral; we need to learn to judge ourselves and other people through the lens of morality and be very firm about it.
Writing from Japan. You are absolutely right about the "Finite Game".
If you can reset your reputation and start over, "Cheating" is indeed the winning strategy.
However, here in Japan, we have a different operating system called "Shinise" (companies lasting over 1,000 years). They play an "Infinite Game".
Their reputation is tied to a "Noren" (shop curtain) or a family name that has been built over centuries. You cannot simply discard it and respawn.
There is a movie hitting theaters here in Tokyo right now called "KOKUHO" (National Treasure). It depicts Kabuki actors who inherit a "Name" (Myoseki) with 400 years of history.
Watching it, I realized: In their world, cheating doesn't just mean losing a job. It means "killing the Name" for all ancestors and future generations. The penalty is infinite.
When the "Reset Button" is removed from the game, "Honesty" and "Sanpo-yoshi" (Three-way satisfaction) naturally become the mathematically dominant strategies.
Cheating only works when you plan to exit.
Japan having the most insane, high effort culture in the world is exactly why they are continuing to slowly die by lack of fertility. Same with South Korea.
Japan will either lose its traditional culture including this long term aversion to "cheating", or they will lose their nation. It's existential and their refusal to embrace globalism will destroy them.
Zero sum game, and yes they (ZSGs) do actually exist nearly everywhere in real life and are the norm. I can't physically be in the same place as another person. Time spent on one action is time not spent on everything else. Every bit of food I eat is food denied from every other person.
> 1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.
True, but this is a necessary feature of a society or workplace to discourage cheating and abuse.
If a person could easily shed their reputation and start over on an equal footing with everyone else, cheating would be a zero-cost option. Cheat until you get caught, then start over and repeat.
This is why trust and reputation are built over time and are so valuable. It’s frustrating for newcomers or those who have lost reputation somehow, but it’s a necessary feature to discourage fraud and cheating.
This doesn't make sense to me, our current prosperity is founded on an enormous mountain of collaboration and shared beliefs. Usually not out of selflessness of course, often guided and forced by strong leadership and/or strong institutional structures to bend selfishness into selflessness (like capitalism to a degree).
Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints but due to self-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture). Broad collaboration and institution building is always the only way out of the hole, although the hole can be very deep and collaboration can be very costly until you get out.
You are right though, that for an individual living in a good collaborative system, often cheating is very effective, it's just that the system can only handle a certain amount of that behavior before it collapses.
As is discussed in the first scene of Plato's The Republic (surprisingly entertaining to modern tastes), the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just". If people are going to be assholes, it is actually much better if they are discrete about it and keep a pretense of civilization. When people start acting conspicuously like assholes, out of a weird sense of honesty, that's when it propagates and the whole thing collapses, like a bank-run. It's an ancient story that we are still living.
"Therefore Socrates said that it wasn’t enough to use the intellect in all things, but it was important to know for which cause one was exerting it. We would now say: One must serve the “good cause.” But to serve the good cause is—to be moral. Thus, Socrates is the founder of ethics.
"Socrates opened this war, and its peaceful end does not occur until the dying day of the old world."
Plato/Socrates are the original ghost story tellers. I spit on their grave. Republic is easily one of the worst books written in human history in terms of its impact. Right up there with Das Kapital.
> Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints
Sometimes highly shrewd rich countries infiltrate the power structure of poor countries through N-pronged strategy to keep them stuck in a rut so that they don't become future threat, also extract their resources in the meantime.
Indeed, the way out of that is also broad collaboration, sometimes not peaceful or clean.
And the last century showed that this also works at a large scale, we all got a lot richer as a global community by letting poor countries develop and doing business with them, instead of exploiting them to death.
Yes, strongly believe this is the case. The corrupt leaders are rarely chosen by the people; they are installed by foreign powers. There are many cases you can dig into which are absolutely atrocious; like people getting paid big money by western leaders to assassinate their friends to take power and pass laws which facilitate the extraction of resources by foreign corporations.
Like the story of Thomas Sankara's assassination by his trusted childhood friend Blaise Compaoré is quite disturbing. It seems like Compaoré was leader for a very long time and is still in politics... I cannot think of a more morally deprived individual. If game theory was as claimed; nobody should want to work with such deeply disloyal and psychopathic individual. It's just like I say; people have a strong tolerance, even attraction to abusers. If you look at the real story, you notice this pattern over and over... but we are so badly gaslit about such things (aka 'PR') that we don't notice.
Ed Witten here : "So first of all thanks very much. I'm very honored to have the chance to give this talk. Of course Nima and I both wish we could do more for
peace than just to give talks at an online meeting for peace. Unfortunately we know that there are lots of bad things happening in the world and we hope that there will be better days ahead. Hopefully as one would say in Hebrew [..] which means soon in our own day.
> the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just"
Yep this is a huge problem now. I think wealth inequality is also making this worse because people often turn a blind eye to the bad behaviors of people who have power over them. This is an extremely powerful effect; it's everywhere. For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament. Employees turning a blind eye to the immoral actions of their boss and coming up with justifications to keep them on a pedestal...
The social structure is not determined by morality; it's the other way round; morality is determined by the social structure.
It reminds me of an old French fable in which a lamb tries to reason with a wolf why he should let him live... The wolf listens to the lamb's logic but then he eats it anyway and the story ends with a sentence like "The reason of the strongest is always the best one."
My point (and Plato's) was rather that some people will definitely cheat, because it's locally rational, and it's actually better for everyone if they are "classy" about it and don't flaunt it too much. A minority will get away with terrible things, but somewhat bounded by conspicuousness, and at least the majority remains blissfully (willfully?) unaware and propping up the civilized system which is so much better for all of us.
It is quite a cynical point of view of course. It's a hard balance, when it gets bad sometimes it's better to air the dirty laundry and go through the pain of purging those cheaters.
But the worse thing is to have people be loud and proud cheaters, which is happening more and more. That's a deadly virus to a civilized society, everyone starts thinking they are dumb for not cheating, and we quickly go back to the dark ages.
It's a bit like calling out the bank for being a fraud because they don't have all the money in a vault, and rushing to get your cash out. If people start taking the red pill and shouting that society is just a game of pretend, which it kind of is, then our very real prosperity can vanish overnight.
>> then our very real prosperity can vanish overnight.
This sentence assumes a certain degree of shared prosperity. I think this is increasingly an illusion. IMO, Social media tends to create filter bubbles which create illusions of shared prosperity. Most of the social bubbles I participate in, the view is much more like 'monopolized prosperity' than 'shared prosperity'.
I've been in a unique position to have mingled with billionaires/millionaires and also normal people and the contrast is significant. In some circles; it's like even the company cook, janitor, receptionist and wall-painter is getting rich... In others, it's like there are some really talented people who keep failing over and over and can't make any money at all from their work; like they're suppressed by algorithms.
I think most people wouldn't mind seeing the whole system collapse as they don't feel they have any stake in it; their experience is that of being oppressed while simultaneously being gaslit about being privileged! It's actually deeply disturbing. I don't think most people on the other side have any idea how bad it is because their reality looks really wonderful.
My view is that the oppression which used to be carried out at a distance in Africa is now being carried out to large groups of people within the same country; and filter bubbles are used to create artificial distance.
My experience of the system is that it works by oppressing people whilst keeping them out of view so that those who benefit from that system can enjoy both physical as well as psychological comfort. The physical comfort is real but the psychological comfort is built on the illusion of meritocracy; which can be maintained by creating distance from the oppressed. It's why the media keeps spreading narratives about homeless people being 'crazy' and 'on drugs' IMO. Labeling people as crazy is a great way to ensure that nobody talks to them to actually learn about their experience. It's the ultimate way to dehumanize someone. Because their experiences would shock most people and create deep discomfort; it would sow distrust in the system.
> This sentence assumes a certain degree of shared prosperity. I think this is increasingly an illusion. IMO, Social media tends to create filter bubbles which create illusions of shared prosperity
I think it's exactly the other way around? Wealth inequality (in the US, as an example) has actually not drastically changed in the past few decades, but I do agree the perception of unfairness has increased a lot.
My hunch is that everyone is now being fed wealth porn on social media and comparing themselves to influencers or actual billionaires who actually do live or pretend to live a .01%er lifestyle.
Life's never been fair; but feeling shortchanged for living a solid middle class lifestyle because Bezos has a big yacht seems new.
Ultimately it all feels depressingly materialistic to me. Go work on something actually meaningful!
> For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament.
If I were to extend your analogy, the problem in modern world has become aggresive. E.g. you have committed a crime or fraud. Everyone else has proved decisively and beyond doubt that you have committed fraud such that it has become common knowledge. yet the justice system isn't acting. In a sense, you are taunting and teasing me, "what you gonna do about it?" This is inviting violence. The guy killing insurance company CEO has exactly this line of thinking.
> Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints but due to self-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture)
This doesn't seem true and I'd be interested in any stats that back this up. It reminds me of a very interesting result (that most never internalize) which is that the number one way to avoid corruption is to pay public servants handsomely such that the job rivals the private sphere. Most developing countries can't do that, and that's why most of them have issues with corruption.
Rich countries also have crab-bucket like behavior. You don't have to look twice at the current US administration to see lots of corruption and cheating and fraud, for example.
Pretty clear trend: low-trust societies have low gdp and high-trust societies have high gdp, regardless of resource distribution. Africa/South America are resource rich, japan/iceland are resource poor.
Which direction does the causation within that correlation (if any) flow?
I can easily conjure a scenario where high per-capita GDP makes trusting easier (either because there’s enough to go around and/or because there are reliable police/judicial sanctions for violating trust) than in a hardscrabble low per-capita GDP society with lower (insufficient?) lawfulness.
I didn't mean it so literally. Having robust taxation and well supported institutions is what I mean by "broad collaboration" and an effective "culture", as in a social operating-system a set of values and habits, that continually support and self-heal such constructions.
I don't meant that everybody should be nice, and that poor countries are somehow culturally nasty, absolutely not. Real collaboration cannot be just founded on morals and good faith, it's not sustainable, it's more about incentives engineering.
In terms of references, the main one that comes to mind is the economics Nobel price from 2024: "for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity".
Cooperation has been "invented" in evolution many times independently and is long term stable in many species.
If your comment was true that fact wouldn't exist.
We may consider the world we live in today competitive, but at the end of the day, humanity is a globe spanning machine that exists due to cooperative behavior at all scales.
Comments such as yours are really missing the forest for the trees.
I suspect that it's really the fact that cooperation is so powerful and pervasive that makes it normal to the point where any deviation from it feels outrageous.
So you focus on the outrageous due to availability bias (seeing the trees rather than the forest).
But it does? What do you think it optimizes other than individual fitness?
I think I understand the GP pretty well. Cheating, or defection in the language of evolutionary theory, is subject to frequency based selection, meaning it is strongly selected against if its frequency is too high in the population. It's not a stable strategy.
It can be a winning strategy for a few individuals in a cooperative environment, yes, but it breaks down at a point because the system collapses if too many do it.
And yet, cooperative systems are common and stable, which is my point.
>What do you think it optimizes other than individual fitness?
Chance to pass genes forward. This is only equivalent to individual fitness for very solitary species and humans aren't.
As an extreme example, take soldier termites - their chance to pass their genes is zero, but the chance for the colony to survive grows. Also gay people exist (they also - usually - don't reproduce, but help others instead).
Humans naturally care about their family and tribe because this increases the chance of their bloodline to survive.
That's a distinction without a difference. Worker ants have high individual fitness if their colony successfully reproduces because they pass their genes forward.
In evolutionary theory this is made clear by using the term "inclusive fitness" - worker ants actually pass their genes on to future generations more effectively by taking the detour, if you will, through the queen.
If you want to be nitpicky and argue we should consider the individual gene the unit of selection, as Dawkins famously argued, I'm not going to disagree, you can see it that way too.
That specific distinction very rarely leads to different predictions though.
A world where everyone is a Giver is not a stable world. Ask Gemini or Claude to explain. Cheating by definition works only in minority. If everyone is in line to buy tickets, only few cheaters can get early tickets and it is a stable strategy. But everyone is a cheater, everyone is worse off.
I didn't realize that morality and philosophy had concrete black and white answers, and that adding your own thoughts to the discussion regarding those things was discouraged.
I'm not trying to be a shit, but your post comes across as either very gatekeeping or just snotty for no good reason. Do you have arguments to support what you're saying other than a hand-waving dismissal of the site?
The entire premise is not philosophically rigorous
Read any serious philosophical work and the first thing it does it tells you what it’s assumptions are about the world and basis for reality.
At no point does this website do that at all it just assumes a lot of background and then jumps into this concept that there exist these “win-win games” with a bare grounding in game theory, and that all we need to do is pull the concepts out of existing structures without acknowledging any of the foundational structures or any of the epistemological Foundations of the claims.
My primary problem with it is that it sneaks in a bunch of factually incorrect and problematic concepts like the idea of capitalism as win-win which has been thoroughly debunked by Proudhon in “What is Property” and expanded on by Graeber in his book Debt
Proudhon and Marx were two philosophers making observations about a rapidly-changing economy nearly two centuries ago. Society, politics, and economies have all drastically changed since then.
I don't think "Proudhon debunked this" is going to change anyone's mind. I don't find his arguments particularly compelling, even taking the historical context into account. I see him as trying to take a moral position and then trying to shoehorn it into an economic theory. The spirit of the underlying moral position is much more interesting than his pseudo-intellectual attempt at rigour.
What is property and Das Kapital are even more relevant now than when authored.
Why? because the plurality of people in the late 19th century when all these things were being written was still primarily smallish groups with limited capacity to generate impactful externalities. Read: Engels formation of the family, property etc..
While there was global capitalism, it had not entirely consumed the entire globe at that point
Ad of today there are no parts of the globe that are free from the reach of some property owner attempting to extract a resource from property that they do not control. There are no indigenous peoples that are free from the effects and impact of global climate change as a function of global capitalism
A random note in case Non-Zero-Sum James is looking: It's frustrating that reading footnotes[0] requires scrolling back and finding your previous place. A link from the footnote back to the original place in the text or something that reveals a footnote in-place (e.g. on hover) is fairly universal and very helpful!
[0] e.g. https://nonzerosum.games/emergencespirals.html#notes
"... if you take anything away from this, it is to recognise that if meritocracy is based on achievement only, then we must be sure not to confuse it with effortocracy when it comes to its moral weight."
Related reading: The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel (I was hoping the article would reference this, and it does.)
[1] https://nonzerosum.games/effortocracy.html
Systems that try to get too “objective” fail to recognize this as most KPIs are on direct outcomes that are easy to measure, though often less important.
No joke I once worked at a company with multi-category numeric ratings that then rolled up to a total rating score that had 2 decimal places of precision.
To that boss’ credit, the text feedback was actually useful, but the numeric scores were comical.
> "To truly measure and reward by an effortocratic measure we need both a top-down and bottom-up approach
- At the top, reward people who have overcome more to get to the same point
- At the bottom, level the playing field so that potential, wherever it is, can be realised"
The way I think of it is using a vector analogy. They're arguing that a meritocracy only reward the end point, and that instead we should value both the magnitude of the vector in addition to its end point. You're interpreting effortocracy (not unfairly IMO) as only rewarding the magnitude of the vector, which is indeed absurd.
In my opinion however, they themselves are straw-manning what they point to as "moral meritocracy". As I understand it, their main gripe is that achievements are not only rewarded, but also ascribed higher moral weight, which is plain false. People vastly prefer rag-to-riches story to born-rich ones. So much so that you have many rich people straight up lying about their origin stories to make it sound more rag-to-riches than it is.
Edit: removed last bit that was harsher than intended.
1) Mixing up merit (ability to provide achievement) with effort.
2) Assuming it has anything to do with moral weight. While it primarily targets just decision making and distribution of deserts (rewards).
Why distribution of deserts should be meritocratic? Because that ensure that collaboration is positive-sum for everybody involved. Considering this, fair reward for participation in some group effort has to satisfy a condition that reward is at least as large as a missed opportunity (of collaborating in some other group, individually, or not collaborating at all).
It is obviously impossible to engage with every single idea proposed at once, but I think the main thrust of the argument is encapsulated in
>"Personally, I feel like the world might be a happier, more cooperative place if situations were by default framed as Stag Hunts."
Which is just so bizarrely and obviously false. Especially when just sentences before the issue of climate change came up, which certainly is not a positive sum game and we would be lucky if it was a zero sum game, but given all evidence it is very obviously a negative sum game, where governments get to talk about who has to bear the most pain. (And it isn't clear that cooperation even is the best opportunity for survival)
The optimism strikes me as so blindingly naive that it makes it hard to take anything said seriously. Maybe this is just a generational divide, many of the older people I know, in their 40s or older, seem much more optimistic about the state of the world. And the attempt to justify affirmative action is just so bizarre. If historic grievances are legitimate arguments for preferential treatment, then you will never get me to accept that this is anything but a brutal race to the bottom, which is about who can make the other suffer most. No, the world is not a positive sum game and I will never live under the delusion that it is.
https://nonzerosum.games/cooperationvsdefection.html
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
The article explicitly addresses this:
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434065
you’re sitting here saying “this person addressed it” and I’m saying no they didn’t.
They are entirely misguided and ignorant about this argument and you’re taking it as though it’s a reasonable argument because apparently you’re also ignorant about this argument
it’s entirely wrong and is at best a naïve capitalist propaganda interpretation with absolutely no grounding in history
There are literally dozens of philosophers who have tomes of more research on this going back to the 16th and 17th centuries that demonstrably show that what we call capitalism is definitionally zero sum
All you have to do is go read proudhon what is property chapter 4
Here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-joseph-proudh...
Some raw thoughts of mine if I may (feel free to add seasoning):
You mention that capitalism is definitionally zero-sum, and you seem to be facing quite a bit of resistance. I've had similar thoughts (perhaps still premature) that capitalism is zero-sum, but only (?) under a strong definition of "zero". I've not fleshed out my thoughts completely, but I suspect there are intangible/abstract dimensions along which we maintain some kind of equilibrium, regardless of what we do. "Do" here is quite abstract, but as a first approximation in the realm of economics, it might refer to any act of investment, compensation, or labour. (I may be abusing some technical terms in economics here—not my home turf.) A separate question could then emerge as to how significant these intangible/abstract dimensions are.
Actually, I'm not even sure that this is specific to the context of capitalism. However, whether something is a zero-sum game would seem relevant to systems obsessed with objective quantification, and where that quantification is heavily involved in steering moral views (or decision making), and I view capitalism as one of them.
capitalism however makes transactionalism the explicit structure such that it cannot coexist with any other type of ownership regime by function
That is to say, if you look at anarcho socialist philosophy it can theoretically coexist with other philosophies inside the same state and action space
Historically however, we have not found a stable equilibrium for the lived reality of our experience such that we could map it cleanly onto some discreet and identified philosophical framework
So neither anarcho-socialism nor capitalism is a sustainable equilibrium point due to the constraints of a human biological substrate
Claiming that “it could” or “can” or “is the best we can do” are all beside the point, because they ignore the intractable fundamental fact of separating human systems from all other systems
Every possible game is zero sum because the universe isn’t creating more matter or energy, it’s just moving around. How we move it around is the problem to solve and anyone using weak justifications with bankrupt epistemological foundations is just wasting everyone’s time.
Like this is the entire history of capitalism and it’s not even close
the fact that other organizations (USSR, China) do the same thing (horde property and then use consolidated resources to enforce economic heirarchy) but don’t call it capitalism doesn’t make it any less true
They can say “communism” all day but if the functional properties of the system of the Russian Federation or CCP are that Property control is limited to a small group of elites who then use those resources to create a command economy that is purely capitalist philosophy.
There’s no period of time where that has not been true for some portion is society, but we reached a point to which there are no places where that is not true.
In the passage you linked to, the author argues that property is impossible, which seems like a rather different argument than the one you are making.
If you read Prudhon thoroughly you’ll understand that his critique is that the entire concept of capitalism is based on the concept of property (undisputed) and the concept of property is an entirely made up mythical thing (disputed)
And what does that have to do with non-zero-sum games?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.
Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe
Nothing is free
energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process
No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that
Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible.
Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero?
I’m describing conservation laws in physical state space.
Preference gains don’t violate thermodynamics, but they also don’t escape zero-sum reality once you include energy, ecology, and time.
You’re doing what I’m complaining about separating Economics from ecology - there’s a very firm reason why climate changes the most important topic of our decade is because we have to merge our lived experience with the work experience and kill this embedded dualism that somehow human environments are different than the rest of the universe.
It’s like you’re trying to do control theory without energy constraints.
We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.
The sum doesn't have to be zero.
And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.
Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.
Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?
However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not?
Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange?
There’s no free lunch
Human activity takes from the non-human environment.
Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically
Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation
I understand they're trying to go for a whimsical and fun feeling, but imo as implemented it is far from "really well made".
> Critics of affirmative action often commit the fallacy of letting a failure in one area doom the entire enterprise. This ignores the interdependent nature of affirmative action. [1]
Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics. The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
[1]: https://nonzerosum.games/unlockingsolutions.html
Due to this, people considered affirmative actions to correct for this skew. That would actually make it a meritocratic motivated AA.
And then you have the idea of missed potential. Those who weren't given the opportunity to develop, it limits the pool of exceptional candidates. It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process, but we were artificially limiting those with potential. The challenge is bigger here, so you need a bootstrapping process, because you're faced with a chicken and egg situation. You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect. I admit that this is the more controversial one, as it means temporarily favoring disadvantaged groups to bootstrap things. I just wanted to point out that there's a meritocratic angle to it as well.
Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.
> You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks
That is not meritocracy.
AA is being used as an example of the failure mode where:
"The failure of a single component does not mean the program is fatally flawed; rather, it highlights the need for a comprehensive, coordinated approach"
Indeed, I'm sure the author would agree that part of the comprehensive solution is to increase the amount of university admission slots.
The implicit argument is that AA's largest challenge is a coordination problem. It's not. It's a clash in values and a fight over zero-sum rewards.
If the author could propose an affirmative action program that didn’t have that “single component” at the core of how it operates then I’d be more interested in the argument, but as-is it just feels like an attempt to forcefully ignore valid criticisms.
This is is such a weird non-argument dressed as some gotcha. "Some critics of x are committing y fallacy" is probably universally correct statement. It is so devoid of any meaning that this particular type of discourse has not only a name, but a mascot too.
Either way, seems like a very narrow distinction you are drawing when he is making the meatier claim that affirmative action is fundamentally flawed.
A large part of the value of elite education is its scarcity, and adding more slots dilutes that value.
No doubt in a world of 8 billion people, there exists someone, somewhere, who has for some reason voiced the belief described - i.e. that if institutions really heavily based their selection of applicants on skin color rather than merit, that would be good, but that because in reality institutions have only been convinced to somewhat compromise on merit-based selection in favour of skin-color-based selection, it's bad, and should thus be abandoned completely in favour of total meritocracy. But that belief would really be rather odd, and I have never seen it expressed even once in my entire life.
Nor am I convinced, despite its oddness, that it is properly considered to contain a fallacy! After all, sometimes it really is the case, for various reasons, that some endeavour is only worth doing if total success can be achieved, and not worth the downsides if you can only succeed partially. No doubt if someone really held the allegedly fallacious view described, they would believe affirmative action is exactly such an endeavour and be able to explain why!
> We sometimes run into problems where a number of factors have to be addressed simultaneously in order for them to be effective at all. One weak link can ruin it for the rest. These are called Coordination Problems.
Coordination problems are about multiple actors choosing interdependent outcomes, rather than a problem that needs everything to be done right. This sounds more like a "Weakest Link" problem than a coordination problem.
Not that it invalidates the rest of the post, but it did make me dig in more into the person's background and showed that they're more of a journalist than a game theory expert.
I wish I could find the source, but the vast majority of universities don't have a fixed admissions quota. They are criteria based (if you meet the criteria, you get in). In principle, AA admissions did not prevent others from getting a seat.
Of course, it's possible the general admissions criteria is raised slightly to compensate, but again - for most universities, AA admissions wasn't a significant number, and however much the bar raised, it was likely minuscule.
I'll be blunt. Everyone I've personally known who didn't get admissions in a particular university and blamed AA for it was trying to get into a top school, and likely didn't earn his spot.
Everything looks like zero-sum if viewed as a static, local model.
(See Caplan's Case Against Education.)
In a purely meritocratic sense, all other beings equal a university that provides a diverse faculty and student body will better educate its students than a university that doesn't, all other things remaining equal.
If the team uses relational databases but someone shows up to an interview with a strongly held belief that NoSQL is the way to go, they’re likely to be rejected because their ideas don’t match the team’s. Same if the team strongly believes in some version of agile but a person they interview doesn’t like agile. Diversity programs in practice never even attempt to push diversity of ideas, they ignore all of that and focus on things like gender and ethnic background.
This feels like a dangerous opinion to voice, but the workplace affirmative action programs I’ve seen in practice have been very poor in their implementation. At my last workplace that instituted diversity targets, HR would just start rejecting hires if they thought it would skew the diversity numbers in the wrong way. So you’d hit a wall where the only candidates you were allowed to hire couldn’t be, for example, men or of Asian descent or some other demographic trait they thought was over-represented. None of this improved diversity of ideas, it became a game to find a person whose ideas matched the team who also happened to have the right gender or skin color to keep our diversity statistics going in the direction HR demanded.
A lot of proponents of affirmative action will agree with this. They'll explicitly acknowledge that people admitted under AA will be underqualified, due to factors mentioned in the article:
Said proponents would agree that AA is a failure if assessed strictly by these criteria. However, they would then go on to say that the benefits conferred by an elite education to the current crop of AA beneficiaries lead to future generations of minorities being less likely to experience the aforementioned issues, so after accounting for all future externalities, AA is a net good. As Justice O'Connor famously wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) [0], That said, it's been almost 25 years since she wrote that (and 50 years since California v. Bakke), and it's debatable whether those future externalities have manifested.[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/
Yup. Though there is a third option: completely ignore the meritocracy vs. equity zero-sum game and simply argue that demographic-based weighting of applicants is an ineffective way to rectify those historical injustices. It is treating a symptom, not the underlying disease.
Is there any effective way to rectify them or the underlying disease that you'd recommend?
It turns out that the government forcing racial integration actually works! Being a "quota ridden society" would be good for America.
That's the argument for it, not my belief. The argument for AA is that the so-called meritocracy had/has its own unequal distributions.
If that was the case it would be based on family wealth/income.
AA just pushes against THAT, for better or worse.
Perhaps you'd like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockout .
Yours sincerely, a TGM-fan
1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.
2. How forgiving people are and how tolerant they are to deception, abuse and immorality. I hate to say it but a lot of people are attracted to abusers. They keep going back to the same kinds of people who will abuse them over and over. These same people who tolerate abuse often seem to show disrespect and look down on good, honest people. I cannot overstate how powerful this effect is; and it seems to be getting worse over time! And these people keep coming up with narratives to gaslight themselves about their abusers "they're not so bad"... People will especially do this when their abuser has power over them (Stockholm Syndrome).
Once you factor these two things, cheating is the clear winning strategy. By a mile... It's objectively a superior strategy. If we just follow game theory; it will take us somewhere really dark. Game theory isn't what's keeping the world civilized. Society literally all rests on people's irrational emotions and moral principles.
The desire to do the right thing is completely irrational and is a net loss to the individual. If we continue with the current system and current assumptions, all moral individuals will be wiped out because they are at a HUGE disadvantage. To solve our social problems, we need to be more moral; we need to learn to judge ourselves and other people through the lens of morality and be very firm about it.
However, here in Japan, we have a different operating system called "Shinise" (companies lasting over 1,000 years). They play an "Infinite Game". Their reputation is tied to a "Noren" (shop curtain) or a family name that has been built over centuries. You cannot simply discard it and respawn.
There is a movie hitting theaters here in Tokyo right now called "KOKUHO" (National Treasure). It depicts Kabuki actors who inherit a "Name" (Myoseki) with 400 years of history. Watching it, I realized: In their world, cheating doesn't just mean losing a job. It means "killing the Name" for all ancestors and future generations. The penalty is infinite.
When the "Reset Button" is removed from the game, "Honesty" and "Sanpo-yoshi" (Three-way satisfaction) naturally become the mathematically dominant strategies. Cheating only works when you plan to exit.
Japan will either lose its traditional culture including this long term aversion to "cheating", or they will lose their nation. It's existential and their refusal to embrace globalism will destroy them.
Zero sum game, and yes they (ZSGs) do actually exist nearly everywhere in real life and are the norm. I can't physically be in the same place as another person. Time spent on one action is time not spent on everything else. Every bit of food I eat is food denied from every other person.
True, but this is a necessary feature of a society or workplace to discourage cheating and abuse.
If a person could easily shed their reputation and start over on an equal footing with everyone else, cheating would be a zero-cost option. Cheat until you get caught, then start over and repeat.
This is why trust and reputation are built over time and are so valuable. It’s frustrating for newcomers or those who have lost reputation somehow, but it’s a necessary feature to discourage fraud and cheating.
Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints but due to self-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture). Broad collaboration and institution building is always the only way out of the hole, although the hole can be very deep and collaboration can be very costly until you get out.
You are right though, that for an individual living in a good collaborative system, often cheating is very effective, it's just that the system can only handle a certain amount of that behavior before it collapses.
As is discussed in the first scene of Plato's The Republic (surprisingly entertaining to modern tastes), the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just". If people are going to be assholes, it is actually much better if they are discrete about it and keep a pretense of civilization. When people start acting conspicuously like assholes, out of a weird sense of honesty, that's when it propagates and the whole thing collapses, like a bank-run. It's an ancient story that we are still living.
"Therefore Socrates said that it wasn’t enough to use the intellect in all things, but it was important to know for which cause one was exerting it. We would now say: One must serve the “good cause.” But to serve the good cause is—to be moral. Thus, Socrates is the founder of ethics.
"Socrates opened this war, and its peaceful end does not occur until the dying day of the old world."
Plato/Socrates are the original ghost story tellers. I spit on their grave. Republic is easily one of the worst books written in human history in terms of its impact. Right up there with Das Kapital.
Sometimes highly shrewd rich countries infiltrate the power structure of poor countries through N-pronged strategy to keep them stuck in a rut so that they don't become future threat, also extract their resources in the meantime.
And the last century showed that this also works at a large scale, we all got a lot richer as a global community by letting poor countries develop and doing business with them, instead of exploiting them to death.
Like the story of Thomas Sankara's assassination by his trusted childhood friend Blaise Compaoré is quite disturbing. It seems like Compaoré was leader for a very long time and is still in politics... I cannot think of a more morally deprived individual. If game theory was as claimed; nobody should want to work with such deeply disloyal and psychopathic individual. It's just like I say; people have a strong tolerance, even attraction to abusers. If you look at the real story, you notice this pattern over and over... but we are so badly gaslit about such things (aka 'PR') that we don't notice.
https://youtu.be/Ta5Dx327KQc?t=4899
Yep this is a huge problem now. I think wealth inequality is also making this worse because people often turn a blind eye to the bad behaviors of people who have power over them. This is an extremely powerful effect; it's everywhere. For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament. Employees turning a blind eye to the immoral actions of their boss and coming up with justifications to keep them on a pedestal...
The social structure is not determined by morality; it's the other way round; morality is determined by the social structure.
It reminds me of an old French fable in which a lamb tries to reason with a wolf why he should let him live... The wolf listens to the lamb's logic but then he eats it anyway and the story ends with a sentence like "The reason of the strongest is always the best one."
It is quite a cynical point of view of course. It's a hard balance, when it gets bad sometimes it's better to air the dirty laundry and go through the pain of purging those cheaters.
But the worse thing is to have people be loud and proud cheaters, which is happening more and more. That's a deadly virus to a civilized society, everyone starts thinking they are dumb for not cheating, and we quickly go back to the dark ages.
It's a bit like calling out the bank for being a fraud because they don't have all the money in a vault, and rushing to get your cash out. If people start taking the red pill and shouting that society is just a game of pretend, which it kind of is, then our very real prosperity can vanish overnight.
This sentence assumes a certain degree of shared prosperity. I think this is increasingly an illusion. IMO, Social media tends to create filter bubbles which create illusions of shared prosperity. Most of the social bubbles I participate in, the view is much more like 'monopolized prosperity' than 'shared prosperity'.
I've been in a unique position to have mingled with billionaires/millionaires and also normal people and the contrast is significant. In some circles; it's like even the company cook, janitor, receptionist and wall-painter is getting rich... In others, it's like there are some really talented people who keep failing over and over and can't make any money at all from their work; like they're suppressed by algorithms.
I think most people wouldn't mind seeing the whole system collapse as they don't feel they have any stake in it; their experience is that of being oppressed while simultaneously being gaslit about being privileged! It's actually deeply disturbing. I don't think most people on the other side have any idea how bad it is because their reality looks really wonderful.
My view is that the oppression which used to be carried out at a distance in Africa is now being carried out to large groups of people within the same country; and filter bubbles are used to create artificial distance.
My experience of the system is that it works by oppressing people whilst keeping them out of view so that those who benefit from that system can enjoy both physical as well as psychological comfort. The physical comfort is real but the psychological comfort is built on the illusion of meritocracy; which can be maintained by creating distance from the oppressed. It's why the media keeps spreading narratives about homeless people being 'crazy' and 'on drugs' IMO. Labeling people as crazy is a great way to ensure that nobody talks to them to actually learn about their experience. It's the ultimate way to dehumanize someone. Because their experiences would shock most people and create deep discomfort; it would sow distrust in the system.
I think it's exactly the other way around? Wealth inequality (in the US, as an example) has actually not drastically changed in the past few decades, but I do agree the perception of unfairness has increased a lot.
My hunch is that everyone is now being fed wealth porn on social media and comparing themselves to influencers or actual billionaires who actually do live or pretend to live a .01%er lifestyle.
Life's never been fair; but feeling shortchanged for living a solid middle class lifestyle because Bezos has a big yacht seems new.
Ultimately it all feels depressingly materialistic to me. Go work on something actually meaningful!
If I were to extend your analogy, the problem in modern world has become aggresive. E.g. you have committed a crime or fraud. Everyone else has proved decisively and beyond doubt that you have committed fraud such that it has become common knowledge. yet the justice system isn't acting. In a sense, you are taunting and teasing me, "what you gonna do about it?" This is inviting violence. The guy killing insurance company CEO has exactly this line of thinking.
This doesn't seem true and I'd be interested in any stats that back this up. It reminds me of a very interesting result (that most never internalize) which is that the number one way to avoid corruption is to pay public servants handsomely such that the job rivals the private sphere. Most developing countries can't do that, and that's why most of them have issues with corruption.
Rich countries also have crab-bucket like behavior. You don't have to look twice at the current US administration to see lots of corruption and cheating and fraud, for example.
Pretty clear trend: low-trust societies have low gdp and high-trust societies have high gdp, regardless of resource distribution. Africa/South America are resource rich, japan/iceland are resource poor.
I can easily conjure a scenario where high per-capita GDP makes trusting easier (either because there’s enough to go around and/or because there are reliable police/judicial sanctions for violating trust) than in a hardscrabble low per-capita GDP society with lower (insufficient?) lawfulness.
Yemen and the US are equal shades on that trust polling map. That alone should show you it's not really a factor.
India has a higher GDP and GDP per capita than it's neighbor Pakistan, but Pakistan has quite a higher trust score on your map than India.
There are many more examples, just these jumped out at me.
I don't meant that everybody should be nice, and that poor countries are somehow culturally nasty, absolutely not. Real collaboration cannot be just founded on morals and good faith, it's not sustainable, it's more about incentives engineering.
In terms of references, the main one that comes to mind is the economics Nobel price from 2024: "for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity".
if this is true, then the public servant would earn only till he becomes rich equivalent to private sphere job. but nope, they go all the way in.
If your comment was true that fact wouldn't exist.
We may consider the world we live in today competitive, but at the end of the day, humanity is a globe spanning machine that exists due to cooperative behavior at all scales.
Comments such as yours are really missing the forest for the trees.
I suspect that it's really the fact that cooperation is so powerful and pervasive that makes it normal to the point where any deviation from it feels outrageous.
So you focus on the outrageous due to availability bias (seeing the trees rather than the forest).
Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.
Yes it does. In fact, unless you want to get nit-picky about intra-gene, inter-allele selection, that is _exactly_ what it does.
I think I understand the GP pretty well. Cheating, or defection in the language of evolutionary theory, is subject to frequency based selection, meaning it is strongly selected against if its frequency is too high in the population. It's not a stable strategy.
It can be a winning strategy for a few individuals in a cooperative environment, yes, but it breaks down at a point because the system collapses if too many do it.
And yet, cooperative systems are common and stable, which is my point.
Chance to pass genes forward. This is only equivalent to individual fitness for very solitary species and humans aren't.
As an extreme example, take soldier termites - their chance to pass their genes is zero, but the chance for the colony to survive grows. Also gay people exist (they also - usually - don't reproduce, but help others instead).
Humans naturally care about their family and tribe because this increases the chance of their bloodline to survive.
In evolutionary theory this is made clear by using the term "inclusive fitness" - worker ants actually pass their genes on to future generations more effectively by taking the detour, if you will, through the queen.
If you want to be nitpicky and argue we should consider the individual gene the unit of selection, as Dawkins famously argued, I'm not going to disagree, you can see it that way too.
That specific distinction very rarely leads to different predictions though.
I'm not trying to be a shit, but your post comes across as either very gatekeeping or just snotty for no good reason. Do you have arguments to support what you're saying other than a hand-waving dismissal of the site?
Read any serious philosophical work and the first thing it does it tells you what it’s assumptions are about the world and basis for reality.
At no point does this website do that at all it just assumes a lot of background and then jumps into this concept that there exist these “win-win games” with a bare grounding in game theory, and that all we need to do is pull the concepts out of existing structures without acknowledging any of the foundational structures or any of the epistemological Foundations of the claims.
My primary problem with it is that it sneaks in a bunch of factually incorrect and problematic concepts like the idea of capitalism as win-win which has been thoroughly debunked by Proudhon in “What is Property” and expanded on by Graeber in his book Debt
I don't think "Proudhon debunked this" is going to change anyone's mind. I don't find his arguments particularly compelling, even taking the historical context into account. I see him as trying to take a moral position and then trying to shoehorn it into an economic theory. The spirit of the underlying moral position is much more interesting than his pseudo-intellectual attempt at rigour.
Why? because the plurality of people in the late 19th century when all these things were being written was still primarily smallish groups with limited capacity to generate impactful externalities. Read: Engels formation of the family, property etc..
While there was global capitalism, it had not entirely consumed the entire globe at that point
Ad of today there are no parts of the globe that are free from the reach of some property owner attempting to extract a resource from property that they do not control. There are no indigenous peoples that are free from the effects and impact of global climate change as a function of global capitalism
That’s just as fact
That sounds hopelessly naive.
In a zero-sum game, you just min-max and that's it. No hard feelings.
Non-zero-sum games is where you pre-emptively nuke your neighbour.
See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tJQsxD34maYw2g5E4/thomas-c-s...