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Hacker News Hacker NewsA 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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...