Non-Zero-Sum Games • Hacker News Board

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#21

Post by anon84873628 » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

skibidithink wrote: post #11

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"…

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.

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#22

Post by RobotToaster » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:33 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #20

skibidithink wrote: post #11

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"…

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…

>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.

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#23

Post by aprilthird2021 » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

oersted wrote: post #6

cryptica wrote: post #4

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 p…

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-reinf…

> 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.

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#24

Post by asimpletune » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

skibidithink wrote: post #11

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"…

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.

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#25

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

svara wrote: post #7

cryptica wrote: post #4

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 p…

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…

You seem to be misunderstanding the GP.

Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#26

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

skibidithink wrote: post #11

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"…

[deleted]

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#27

Post by Aurornis » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

asimpletune wrote: post #24

skibidithink wrote: post #11

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"…

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 univer…

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.

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#28

Post by oersted » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #23

oersted wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-reinf…

> 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 corrup…

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".

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#29

Post by mf_tomb » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #23

oersted wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-reinf…

> 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 corrup…

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/thumbnail/self-reported-t...

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.

Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games

#30

Post by Aurornis » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

anon84873628 wrote: post #21

skibidithink wrote: post #11

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"…

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.