Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

effectiviology.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 152 posts

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#61

Post by wpietri »

wayoutthere wrote: post #12
doc_gunthrop wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you just described is rivalry-based schadenfreude. > Rivalry-Based Schadenfreude is individualistic and related to interpersonal competition. It arises from humans' desire to stand out from and out-perform their peers. Another person's misfortune elicits pleasure because the observer now feels better about their personal identity and self-worth, instead of their group identity.

I actually believe this effect is responsible for most of the racism we have in the US. Black people are an easily identifiable “lower class” who aren’t supposed to have power over white people or have higher social standing. A lot of Americans were irrationally angry at Barack Obama as a result.

And that's no accident. I'm currently reading Kendi's excellent "Stamped from the Beginning". He goes into a fair bit of detail how early in the US's history poor whites allied with poor blacks in pursuit of better economic equality. The white elites quickly recognized this as a problem and worked to turn poor white people against the black population. We're still paying the price today.

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#62

Post by jasim »

godelski wrote: post #51

One of my favorites is the economy. People constantly talk about there only being a finite number of resources or money. While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations. It is easy to see when you take the historical perspective, that the vast majority of us are living much better off than those a hundred years a…

Peak urban real-estate, regions with good weather, clean air and water, natural resources, biodiversity etc. might be counter points. Unless we achieve fundamental breakthroughs in natural and physical sciences as well as improve basic economic incentive structures that drive corporate behaviour, our current prosperity might be short-lived. It is difficult to confidently predict how any of these things will turn out though - our way of life has undergone massive change in the last five decades than it might have anytime before that, and that pace is only accelerating.

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#63

Post by yyyk »

It seems that the authors do not understand the 'zero-sum' definition and apply it to various situations where it simply does not apply.

To pick for example the first article, the only one linking to the full article and not just an extract:

Australians probably do not believe that there's a fixed sum of humans in the world and every new Iraqi means one less Australian. The demand to pick a nationality might be a bias (though plenty of states do not allow dual-citizenship), but it's not a 'zero sum' bias as commonly understood - nobody believes that there's an 'Australia-Iraq' game where only one side may win.

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#64

Post by pessimizer »

I see this most clearly in people who will not trade in a board game like Monopoly unless the deal is extremely slanted in their favor. They simply can't understand that people who trade will always beat people who don't, and the easiest way to trade is to trade fairly.

If four people are playing a game of Monopoly, and two trade with each other but the other two refuse, now two people are playing Monopoly and the other two are begging for it to end.

(Please don't reply by criticizing Monopoly, I know that many people don't like it, I suspect this is a major reason why.)

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#65

Post by wpietri »

gnicholas wrote: post #17

> people tend to assume that if a product is superior in one dimension then it must be inferior in other dimensions. Assuming price is one of the dimensions, this is generally a true statement. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of best-in-class products that are cheaper than inferior competitors. This can occur for products sold at massive scale and with large tooling costs. This dynamic enables the producers of premium pr…

There are important exceptions, though. It's well demonstrated that wine price influence taste perception, for example [1], [2], [3]. And many of us have seen tech consultants charge prices all out of line with value delivered.

[1] https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/wine-study-shows-price-in... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170814092949.h... [3] http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/expensive-wine-is-for-dup...

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#66

Post by umvi »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #45
mLuby wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically yes, but the key difference is that those index funds are equally available to rich and poor, and the returns are the same for everyone (mostly). Contrast that with the plethora of wealth-increasing opportunities that are not available without a large initial investment or the connections or power that comes with existing wealth.

Your claim is the flip side to the joke that goes something like, "The law is blind to class: it is equally illegal for a rich man to sleep under a bridge as it is for the poor man." The point being: a large fraction of the population in the US is living paycheck to paycheck and has no money to spare for investing in an index fund.

And yet many blow at least $3000+ per year on worthless consumables like cigarettes and lotto (at least my pack-a-day neighbors do). $3k per year in an index fund is certainly not insignificant.

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#67

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

pessimizer wrote: post #64

I see this most clearly in people who will not trade in a board game like Monopoly unless the deal is extremely slanted in their favor. They simply can't understand that people who trade will always beat people who don't, and the easiest way to trade is to trade fairly. If four people are playing a game of Monopoly, and two trade with each other but the other two refuse, now two people are playing Monopoly and the ot…

It's one of my all-time favorites. My favorite 'house rule' was invented by my nephew: He negotiated a % of rent I collected utilizing properties he traded to me.

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#68

Post by Chris_Chambers »

whatshisface wrote: post #32
zwkrt wrote: post #2

I see people interpret personal comfort as zero sum and it drives me nuts. Like somehow other people being safe and comfortable devalues ones own safety and comfort.

Could you give some examples?

[dead]

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#69

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

ska wrote: post #29
smallnamespace wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wealth is not zero sum But what relative wealth buys - a safer, more comfortable position in society - definitely is.

I don't think that is quite right. Consider the difference between a society with extremely uneven wealth distribution, such that only a tiny percentage felt safe an comfortable. It's easy to imagine a more even wealth distribution changing that for a large percentage of people. There is a tautological zero-sum ordering in relative wealth, but it's not clear that correlates to anything meaningful to vast majority of…

A higher level of relative wealth unlocks an advantage in the allocation of scarce resources like land and housing within a particular locale, which is meaningful to lots of people.

Re: The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

#70

Post by Retric »

godelski wrote: post #51

One of my favorites is the economy. People constantly talk about there only being a finite number of resources or money. While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations. It is easy to see when you take the historical perspective, that the vast majority of us are living much better off than those a hundred years a…

Money is a surprisingly poor way of measuring an economy. AC may be cheap as a percentage of GDP, but it can make a huge difference in quality of life. However, if you look at meat production as a share of GDP it significantly reduces the calculated economic growth over very long time periods.
Post reply on HN