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

This article just kicked me off into a one hour tangent thinking about voting reform activism and my frustration with staunch ordinal voting advocates.

I've found that a lot of ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel that in order for a voting system to work well, it must impose a total order on peoples' preferences. Although they might say that people's preferences are naturally totally ordered, and that it wouldn't be an imposition at all. For me, ordinal systems are destroying information about equal openness to multiple choices. They are filtering the nuances of my preferences through a strict and destructive hierarchy. All just to distill these hypothetical "favorites" that I don't actually have, but which ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel are real anyway.

But I just don't believe that. It's like a whole different worldview. I believe that this sort of bias is at play in that broken, age old gap between ordinal and cardinal voting system advocates.

I wish some funny people would get together and do skits exposing the quirks of different voting systems by playing them out in an everyday, relatable situations e.g. a group of people choosing what restaurant to go to.

I can just imagine a Rob Richie character enforcing that everyone must have a strictly ranked preference between pizza and Thai food. No you are not allowed to be open to both. You must declare which is your ultimate favorite of the two. Even if it means alienating our lactose intolerant friend. They'll be fine since there's salad at the pizza place.

Trading in Monopoly is not zero-sum, the outcome is.

Sounds masterful. I've always explained Monopoly as a trading game unlike any other out there in that you spend the entire first 3/4 of the game building up to one big trade. It may be a complex multi-part trade, involving other trades in preparation, but it's all you were working towards. After that trade, you're just a passenger seeing how your valuations played out.

Sometimes, like what you did here, you can just structure everything so well that every trade is a better deal for the other player than it is for you, but the sum total of the trades makes you unstoppable. As I mentioned before, this is almost inevitable when you spread your trades between all of the players, and they don't trade with each other. So if you specifically target their needs (like you did), they might not even be able to come up with productive trades with each other...

Every single example of zero sum thinking the author used was of whites and men trying to protect their own interests though zero-sum thinking which I found interesting. The author also seems to ignore that altruistic policies which could garner majority groups indirect benefits are themselves based on zero-sum thinking.

When I hear people justify affirmative action policies and racial and gender quotas some of the most frequent stats I heard bring up is relative income levels, relative employment levels, relative everything. Essentially the argument is based around the idea that "majorities' succeeding must have come at the expense of other groups. Even in say... a field like computing in America which is an economic juggernaut that popped up from nowhere which funnels money into the country... the very fact that more White/Asian/Indian men have gotten more jobs than other groups is framed as a crime against those other groups when this is not obvious. Specific needless discrimination and bias is brought up to bring home an argument that majority groups have been playing a nepotistic zero-sum game to their benefit and others and the greater good of societies detriment by keeping talented people with diverse perspectives down. Which isn't an obviously wrong argument yet the solutions on how to fight against this issue like affirmative action are fundamentally couched in zero-sum thinking. People who oppose it do not have zero-sum bias although they are arguably bias towards selfishness. Those are not the same thing.

I don't believe the author made his argument very well. He's confusing zero-sum bias with other types of bias. Singling out white men in all his examples also makes him come off as acting as if it's one group which has the problem which is unlikely to persuade anybody that it's personally wrong for them to engage in zero-sum bias.

P.S. Is zero-sum thinking truly irrational with the future repercussions of population growth and global warming? Time will tell.

Gamers go apeshit over games for other men that they don't like. Or doritos. Gaming is absolutely worst example for this, because the community tend to be volatile over stupidest nonsense.