I'm a sucker for anything with game theory in the title. Can't wait to read more; thanks for sharing!
Non-Zero-Sum Games
71–80 of 218 posts
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#72> Hi, I'm Non-Zero-Sum James, your companion on this exploration of win-win games [...]
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...
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be misunderstanding the GP. Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.
But it does? What do you think it optimizes other than individual fitness? I think I understand the GP pretty well. Cheating, or defection in the language of evolutionary theory, is subject to frequency based selection, meaning it is strongly selected against if its frequency is too high in the population. It's not a stable strategy. It can be a winning strategy for a few individuals in a cooperative environment, yes…
A world where everyone is a Giver is not a stable world. Ask Gemini or Claude to explain. Cheating by definition works only in minority. If everyone is in line to buy tickets, only few cheaters can get early tickets and it is a stable strategy. But everyone is a cheater, everyone is worse off.
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
You should read about Baumol cost disease if you want to understand why what you just said is totally misguided https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no. Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the univ…
Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum.
We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.
The sum doesn't have to be zero.
And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
You should read about Baumol cost disease if you want to understand why what you just said is totally misguided https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no. Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the univ…
> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain
Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.
Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#76Lots 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"…
To counter that, though without a precise economic analysis, both university admissions and employment grew during the affirmative action era. Everything looks like zero-sum if viewed as a static, local model.
University admission is arguably bad for society.
(See Caplan's Case Against Education.)
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#77Earlier 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…
> the number one way to avoid corruption is to pay public servants handsomely such that the job rivals the private sphere
if this is true, then the public servant would earn only till he becomes rich equivalent to private sphere job. but nope, they go all the way in.
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#78Earlier 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…
> the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just" Yep this is a huge problem now. I think wealth inequality is also making this worse because people often turn a blind eye to the bad behaviors of people who have power over them. This is an extremely powerful effect; it's everywhere. For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament.…
> For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament.
If I were to extend your analogy, the problem in modern world has become aggresive. E.g. you have committed a crime or fraud. Everyone else has proved decisively and beyond doubt that you have committed fraud such that it has become common knowledge. yet the justice system isn't acting. In a sense, you are taunting and teasing me, "what you gonna do about it?" This is inviting violence. The guy killing insurance company CEO has exactly this line of thinking.
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't realize that morality and philosophy had concrete black and white answers, and that adding your own thoughts to the discussion regarding those things was discouraged. I'm not trying to be a shit, but your post comes across as either very gatekeeping or just snotty for no good reason. Do you have arguments to support what you're saying other than a hand-waving dismissal of the site?
The entire premise is not philosophically rigorous Read any serious philosophical work and the first thing it does it tells you what it’s assumptions are about the world and basis for reality. At no point does this website do that at all it just assumes a lot of background and then jumps into this concept that there exist these “win-win games” with a bare grounding in game theory, and that all we need to do is pull t…
Proudhon and Marx were two philosophers making observations about a rapidly-changing economy nearly two centuries ago. Society, politics, and economies have all drastically changed since then.
I don't think "Proudhon debunked this" is going to change anyone's mind. I don't find his arguments particularly compelling, even taking the historical context into account. I see him as trying to take a moral position and then trying to shoehorn it into an economic theory. The spirit of the underlying moral position is much more interesting than his pseudo-intellectual attempt at rigour.
Re: Non-Zero-Sum Games
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should read about Baumol cost disease if you want to understand why what you just said is totally misguided https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no. Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the univ…
> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/po…
Humans can’t convert sun energy into biological energy. We aren’t plants.
However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not?
Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange?
There’s no free lunch
Human activity takes from the non-human environment.
Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically
Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation