101–110 of 152 posts
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Protip: please don't say "humans" when you can just say 'people', or even 'folks'! It makes you sound a lot more, well, human , and less like a poorly-programmed, clunky robot. Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/style-guide-not-soundi...
this feels like a superfluous nit
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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.
Funny corollaries because Monopoly is a zero-sum game (at the end there will be a ordering of players by relative wealth, and their absolute wealth ceases to matter): players should be trying to 1) trade as much as possible, even if some trades are slightly slanted against them, 2) spread their trades evenly amongst the other players, and 3) to actively discourage trades between other players. You might as well give…
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…
Allow me to boast about my single most fantastic monopoly play where nobody wanted to trade at all, so I initiated a series of trades where I gave each opponent a monopoly without getting myself one, except for the very last trade of all with a player that had all the cash in the game and no properties and I gave him a small monopoly and got a huge one + all the cash to build on it. They key is that each trade I made increased the opponents chances to win enormously, but the last one basically gave me the game in exchange for a small chance to someone that had none at all.
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It’s a common fallacy to believe that wealth is zero sum. It’s also a common fallacy to believe that, since it’s not zero sum, gains by one group are uncorrelated to losses by another. If the rich got richer, does that mean they took from the poor? No. But it also doesn’t mean they didn’t . As usual, you have to look at the specifics. The world does have limited resources and capacity for economic growth. In your ind…
It occurs to me that there’s a simpler way to put it: wealth creation is not a zero sum game, but wealth allocation is.
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…
Based on observations I have the opposite view. A lot of human behavior would not make sense if we only measured resources and not social competition over wealth and status. There is even biological aspects like stress which get effected by the relative status between members of a community. Resources however increases each year with more people enjoying the benefits.
> RESOURCES ... INCREASES EACH YEAR
I wouldn't call this a zero nor negative sum game if the game is to gather resources (resources with certain value. Which I think you'd agree that more recent resources have higher value. Like an AC vs a fan).
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.
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…
Like 1% or 10%?
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Could you give some examples?
What I was thinking of as I typed that comment was people who begrudge increases in the standard of living for those in poverty. I see this in two forms. The first and most direct form I see is when people don’t want minimum wage to increase because it means their own wage becomes closer to the minimum. The second and more insidious form I see is in judging the entire concept of “poverty” in a critical light. I recal…
I'm going to be the first to acknowledge that you know your own mother a lot better than I do; but strictly from what you've written that is a defensible position.
Most of the readers here live in a society that is extremely compassionate compared to most historical societies; one where there is constant political pressure for the people who make good decisions to support those who make bad decisions. If some impoverished person is going into debt or spending the last of their savings to buy a colour TV, that is money that someone who is relatively well off is going to have to make up later, eg, when our poor friend comes up against unexpected medical expenses. And a colour TV is pretty much a pure luxury that will further cause them to waste time not improving themselves or the world around them.
I'm not about to start shouting at anyone; but being a cautious person who prepares for many contingencies is very frustrating because if you build up a financial buffer against things going wrong you have to start picking up the burden for people who not only made stupid choices, but don't realise it. Simply don't acknowledge that they were stupid and also would make the same choices again with enthusiasm. I don't even mind supporting a few people who are just lazy, but supporting someone who won't acknowledge that they are actively making their situation worse is miserable.
Come to think about it, there must be a class of businesses based on this bias, it must be one of the hardest for people to overcome (just as it is hard to overcome lure of sexualized ads: that too, is an instinct, requiring too much conscious power to reject, especially when seeing it casually).
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…
(edit: it seems that it may be possible to play monopoly in a way that generates infinite money and with no win condition)