This discourse in the comments reminded me of co-operative game strategies, a multi-party Prisoner's dilemma in some sense. If you want to see this in action amongst a group of individuals, you might enjoy this game by Tom Scott [1].
One thing I have always thought was missing in game theory (and it is probably there but I just haven't looked hard enough) is a mathematical framework for how to build trust to increase the infinite payout for everyone. If in the decision making the idea of an offering is added in then it brings up the possibility of gauging trust and building trust so that future actions can capture more value until an optimal infinite policy is attained. So, for instance, I look at all my possible options and I choose one based on how much I trust the other party AND how much I want to increase that trust in the future. So I give them an offering, select an option that gives them a little more but at a cost to me, to prove that I am willing to increase trust. If they reciprocate then I loose nothing and the next offering can be bigger. If they don't then I gained knowledge and my next offering is smaller. Basically, this is like tit for tat but over time and intended to get to the optimal solution instead of the min max solution. Clearly I'm not a mathematician, but I bet this could be refined to exact equations and formalized so that exact offerings could be calculated.
With an optimal way of determining fair splitting of gains like Shapley value[0] you can cooperate or defect with a probability that maximizes other participants expected value when everyone act fairly.
The ultimatum game is the simplest example; N dollars of prize to split, N/2 is fair, accept with probability M / (N /2) where M is what's offered to you; the opponents maximum expected value comes from offering N/2; trying to offer less (or more) results in expected value to them < N/2.
Trust can be built out of clearly describing how you'll respond in your own best interests in ways that achieve fairness, e.g. assuming the other parties will understand the concept of fairness and also act to maximize their expected value given their knowledge of how you will act.
If you want to solve logically harder problems like one-shot prisoners dilemma, there are preliminary theories for how that can be done by proving things about the other participants directly. It won't work for humans, but maybe artificial agents. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.5577
There's certainly academic work about game theory and reputation. Googling "reputation effects in repeated games" shows some mentions in university game theory courses. There's also loads of work about how to incentivizing actors to be truthful (e.g. when reviewing peers or products).
Signaling theory (in evolutionary biology) might also be vaguely related.
This is the TCP backoff algorithm, specifically the slow start to find the optimal bandwidth. In your analogy, it would find the optimal amount that a person is willing to reciprocate.
Not only does this algorithm exist, but we're using it to communicate right now!
I have noticed this algorithm in many places which is why I think it is a missing piece in game theory and why formalizing it could be powerful. People use this instinctively in their interactions with others and algorithms (like the one you pointed out) have been created using the basic concept so a formalization of the math is likely in order. Consider the question of how big the offering should be. What if all parties are actually getting the optimum result, what mechanism stops the increase/why? Does it stop? Could this lead to both parties paying the other larger and larger sums forever? It is a fun thing to think about at least.
Look into cooperative game theory. If I remember correctly, trust is modelled as a way of exchanging information and influencing the probabilities that other players place on your next action
Nature already solved that and implemented it. It's all around us with relationships. Not just among humans. They typically last over a single interaction. Especially if you don't ignore the rules of the game.
But the game theory of nature also leaves room for other sort of players to somehow win over fair play. I thought this was a bug but over time realised it is a feature, critical to making players as a whole stronger. Without it there would be no point for anyone to be creative.
If you can solve the issue and make a playbook so that everyone do tic for tac, it won't take long for a bad actor to exploit it, then more, then you are back to where we are now.
I think this comes down to the fact that we can keep a mental ledger on the reputations of 50–100 people, so our in-built reputation system breaks down at the current scale.
You could try building a social credit system to scale things up, but that tends to upset people...
I don't have a concrete example, but I think you can invent plenty of iterated prisoner's dilemmas with whatever modified rules and variables and find 'tit-for-tat' isn't the end-all-be-all. Like it changes things if there's an infinite or an unknown number of rounds, some of the defects are 'noise', etc.,.
Economist here (but not a game theorist): Repeated games are actually really hard to find closed form equilibria for in general. Additionally, many repeated games have multiple equilibria which makes every bit of follow on analysis that much more annoying. Only very specific categories of repeated game have known nice unique solutions like you are hoping for, and even then usually only under some idealized information set structure. But as other commenters have said, this is an active area of research in Economics and many grad classes are offered on it.
I wouldn't put so much stock in a mathematical model like game theory.
Humanity has accomplished a lot with the notion of number, quantity, and numerical model, but in nearly all these cases our success relies on the heavy use of assumptions and more importantly constraints—most models are actually quite poor when it comes to a Laplacean dream of fully representing everything one might care about in practice.
Unfortunately I think our successes tends to lead individuals to overestimate the value and applicability of abstract models. Human beings are not automatons and human behavior is so variable and vast that I highly doubt any mathematical model could ever really account for it in sufficient detail. Worse, there's a definite quantum problem. The moment you report on predicted behaviors according to your model, human beings can respond to those reports, changing their own behaviors and totally ruining your model by blowing the constraints out of the water.
I actually believe that many of humanity's contemporary social issues actually stem from overreliance on mathematical models with respect to understanding human behavior and making decisions about economics and governance. The more we can directly acquire insight into individuals rather than believe in their "revealed preferences" the better off we'll be if we really want a system in which people's direct wants are represented (rather than telling them "you say you want X but when I give you only Y as choice you choose Y so you must want Y"—it's totally idiotic).
Loving the blog in both style and content, hope to have time to read more in the future!
A random note in case Non-Zero-Sum James is looking: It's frustrating that reading footnotes[0] requires scrolling back and finding your previous place. A link from the footnote back to the original place in the text or something that reveals a footnote in-place (e.g. on hover) is fairly universal and very helpful!
The article on "effortocracy"[1] is pretty very well done. Quoting the end of the article:
"... if you take anything away from this, it is to recognise that if meritocracy is based on achievement only, then we must be sure not to confuse it with effortocracy when it comes to its moral weight."
Related reading: The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel (I was hoping the article would reference this, and it does.)
I don't think we actually want an effortocracy. Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement? There's no inherent moral worth to futile effort that doesn't actually yield any reward, regardless of how laborious it might be.
This is further complicated by the difference between direct and indirect value. I build a thing that produces n value and is directly attributable to me. I also do things that help 100 others produce 10% more value themselves but most of that is attributed to themselves producing 10 * n value overall. How will I be rewarded if at all? Most likely as someone who produced n value.
> Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement?
Of course that would be ridiculous. You're trivializing the author's point. I'm not sure you've actually read the article in full. The author admits the difficulty in measuring it and that we may have to rely on "non-scientific" measurements.
Many of the tech robber barons and VCs (who call themselves "angels") carry the air of "my winnings are entirely of my own making". They rarely acknowledge the role of good fortune (in various aspects) in any meaningful way.
They inhale their success too deeply, as Michael Sandel memorably puts it.
To strong-man their argument, they don't seem to be arguing to reward effort only, in their words:
> "To truly measure and reward by an effortocratic measure we need both a top-down and bottom-up approach
- At the top, reward people who have overcome more to get to the same point
- At the bottom, level the playing field so that potential, wherever it is, can be realised"
The way I think of it is using a vector analogy. They're arguing that a meritocracy only reward the end point, and that instead we should value both the magnitude of the vector in addition to its end point. You're interpreting effortocracy (not unfairly IMO) as only rewarding the magnitude of the vector, which is indeed absurd.
In my opinion however, they themselves are straw-manning what they point to as "moral meritocracy". As I understand it, their main gripe is that achievements are not only rewarded, but also ascribed higher moral weight, which is plain false. People vastly prefer rag-to-riches story to born-rich ones. So much so that you have many rich people straight up lying about their origin stories to make it sound more rag-to-riches than it is.
Edit: removed last bit that was harsher than intended.
But we do do that. People scream from the rooftops that it's unfair to give people money for doing nothing (i.e. welfare or UBI) but it's fine to give the same money to someone who digs ditches all day, and to someone else who fills in ditches. As long as a CEO is involved, for some reason. All of Graeber's bullshit jobs are effortocracy.
Well, i would say that there are two common fallacies w.r.t. meritocracy:
1) Mixing up merit (ability to provide achievement) with effort.
2) Assuming it has anything to do with moral weight. While it primarily targets just decision making and distribution of deserts (rewards).
Why distribution of deserts should be meritocratic? Because that ensure that collaboration is positive-sum for everybody involved. Considering this, fair reward for participation in some group effort has to satisfy a condition that reward is at least as large as a missed opportunity (of collaborating in some other group, individually, or not collaborating at all).
I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.
Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.
Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.
The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.
It's probably a good thing that James isn't zero sum, since otherwise he would have an evil twin out there somewhere trying to get people to be more selfish.
Capitalism is 100% a zero sum game and capitalists love to try to pretend that it’s not
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
>The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
The article explicitly addresses this:
The fact that Capitalism is non-zero-sum doesn't mean it is necessarily positive-sum. An economy that gets out of balance can produce very negative results (which are still non-zero). Cons of capitalism: — Can not be relied on to provide adequate social services, including healthcare and education. — Can be expected to run at a cost to externalities like the environment. — Can produce products that are detrimental to well-being.
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.
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.
I personally found the text hard to read (both because of the typeface and the small size), the animations distracting during scrolling (while I'm trying to skim the content), and the background colors too dark for dark text on them with jarring full white (#FFF) colored text.
I understand they're trying to go for a whimsical and fun feeling, but imo as implemented it is far from "really well made".
The only way for cooperation to be a winning strategy in a prisoner's dilemma is if people have memory/reputation/trust. However, that is very difficult to build in the modern digital world where everyone is a faceless username.
One failure mode is when someone makes 1000 accounts and upvotes everything that benefits them and downvotes everything that doesn't. And you have to balance letting new users into the system with not letting the same user into the system twice, and with not requiring a picture of each user's passport. Or some orange guy convinced 1000 people that what's good for him is objectively good and what's bad for him is objectively bad and facts aren't real and words don't have meanings, which has the same effect as a user with 1000 accounts, but even scanning passports won't help you.
Wow!. Such an original piece of "non-AI slop" content in a long time. Kudos for making this as I myself tipping my toes to explore this concept after hearing about it from multiple sources(Naval Ravikant incl). Thanks for making this and looking forward to more podcast episodes. Cheers
Just aesthetically one of the worst websites I have ever seen.
It is obviously impossible to engage with every single idea proposed at once, but I think the main thrust of the argument is encapsulated in
>"Personally, I feel like the world might be a happier, more cooperative place if situations were by default framed as Stag Hunts."
Which is just so bizarrely and obviously false. Especially when just sentences before the issue of climate change came up, which certainly is not a positive sum game and we would be lucky if it was a zero sum game, but given all evidence it is very obviously a negative sum game, where governments get to talk about who has to bear the most pain. (And it isn't clear that cooperation even is the best opportunity for survival)
The optimism strikes me as so blindingly naive that it makes it hard to take anything said seriously. Maybe this is just a generational divide, many of the older people I know, in their 40s or older, seem much more optimistic about the state of the world. And the attempt to justify affirmative action is just so bizarre. If historic grievances are legitimate arguments for preferential treatment, then you will never get me to accept that this is anything but a brutal race to the bottom, which is about who can make the other suffer most. No, the world is not a positive sum game and I will never live under the delusion that it is.
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 people who tolerate abuse often seem to show disrespect and look down on good, honest people. I cannot overstate how powerful this effect is; and it seems to be getting worse over time! And these people keep coming up with narratives to gaslight themselves about their abusers "they're not so bad"... People will especially do this when their abuser has power over them (Stockholm Syndrome).
Once you factor these two things, cheating is the clear winning strategy. By a mile... It's objectively a superior strategy. If we just follow game theory; it will take us somewhere really dark. Game theory isn't what's keeping the world civilized. Society literally all rests on people's irrational emotions and moral principles.
The desire to do the right thing is completely irrational and is a net loss to the individual. If we continue with the current system and current assumptions, all moral individuals will be wiped out because they are at a HUGE disadvantage. To solve our social problems, we need to be more moral; we need to learn to judge ourselves and other people through the lens of morality and be very firm about it.
Writing from Japan. You are absolutely right about the "Finite Game".
If you can reset your reputation and start over, "Cheating" is indeed the winning strategy.
However, here in Japan, we have a different operating system called "Shinise" (companies lasting over 1,000 years). They play an "Infinite Game".
Their reputation is tied to a "Noren" (shop curtain) or a family name that has been built over centuries. You cannot simply discard it and respawn.
There is a movie hitting theaters here in Tokyo right now called "KOKUHO" (National Treasure). It depicts Kabuki actors who inherit a "Name" (Myoseki) with 400 years of history.
Watching it, I realized: In their world, cheating doesn't just mean losing a job. It means "killing the Name" for all ancestors and future generations. The penalty is infinite.
When the "Reset Button" is removed from the game, "Honesty" and "Sanpo-yoshi" (Three-way satisfaction) naturally become the mathematically dominant strategies.
Cheating only works when you plan to exit.
Japan having the most insane, high effort culture in the world is exactly why they are continuing to slowly die by lack of fertility. Same with South Korea.
Japan will either lose its traditional culture including this long term aversion to "cheating", or they will lose their nation. It's existential and their refusal to embrace globalism will destroy them.
Zero sum game, and yes they (ZSGs) do actually exist nearly everywhere in real life and are the norm. I can't physically be in the same place as another person. Time spent on one action is time not spent on everything else. Every bit of food I eat is food denied from every other person.
> 1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.
True, but this is a necessary feature of a society or workplace to discourage cheating and abuse.
If a person could easily shed their reputation and start over on an equal footing with everyone else, cheating would be a zero-cost option. Cheat until you get caught, then start over and repeat.
This is why trust and reputation are built over time and are so valuable. It’s frustrating for newcomers or those who have lost reputation somehow, but it’s a necessary feature to discourage fraud and cheating.
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-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture). Broad collaboration and institution building is always the only way out of the hole, although the hole can be very deep and collaboration can be very costly until you get out.
You are right though, that for an individual living in a good collaborative system, often cheating is very effective, it's just that the system can only handle a certain amount of that behavior before it collapses.
As is discussed in the first scene of Plato's The Republic (surprisingly entertaining to modern tastes), the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just". If people are going to be assholes, it is actually much better if they are discrete about it and keep a pretense of civilization. When people start acting conspicuously like assholes, out of a weird sense of honesty, that's when it propagates and the whole thing collapses, like a bank-run. It's an ancient story that we are still living.
> Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints
Sometimes highly shrewd rich countries infiltrate the power structure of poor countries through N-pronged strategy to keep them stuck in a rut so that they don't become future threat, also extract their resources in the meantime.
> 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.
> 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. Employees turning a blind eye to the immoral actions of their boss and coming up with justifications to keep them on a pedestal...
The social structure is not determined by morality; it's the other way round; morality is determined by the social structure.
It reminds me of an old French fable in which a lamb tries to reason with a wolf why he should let him live... The wolf listens to the lamb's logic but then he eats it anyway and the story ends with a sentence like "The reason of the strongest is always the best one."
"Therefore Socrates said that it wasn’t enough to use the intellect in all things, but it was important to know for which cause one was exerting it. We would now say: One must serve the “good cause.” But to serve the good cause is—to be moral. Thus, Socrates is the founder of ethics.
"Socrates opened this war, and its peaceful end does not occur until the dying day of the old world."
Plato/Socrates are the original ghost story tellers. I spit on their grave. Republic is easily one of the worst books written in human history in terms of its impact. Right up there with Das Kapital.
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 it's really the fact that cooperation is so powerful and pervasive that makes it normal to the point where any deviation from it feels outrageous.
So you focus on the outrageous due to availability bias (seeing the trees rather than the forest).
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 the concepts out of existing structures without acknowledging any of the foundational structures or any of the epistemological Foundations of the claims.
My primary problem with it is that it sneaks in a bunch of factually incorrect and problematic concepts like the idea of capitalism as win-win which has been thoroughly debunked by Proudhon in “What is Property” and expanded on by Graeber in his book Debt
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" demographics. The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
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.
> Do you disagree that some critics of AA are committing that fallacy?
This is is such a weird non-argument dressed as some gotcha. "Some critics of x are committing y fallacy" is probably universally correct statement. It is so devoid of any meaning that this particular type of discourse has not only a name, but a mascot too.
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.
I certainly claim that almost nobody "commits" that "fallacy" and that it is not a remotely notable viewpoint in the civic discourse of any country I know about.
No doubt in a world of 8 billion people, there exists someone, somewhere, who has for some reason voiced the belief described - i.e. that if institutions really heavily based their selection of applicants on skin color rather than merit, that would be good, but that because in reality institutions have only been convinced to somewhat compromise on merit-based selection in favour of skin-color-based selection, it's bad, and should thus be abandoned completely in favour of total meritocracy. But that belief would really be rather odd, and I have never seen it expressed even once in my entire life.
Nor am I convinced, despite its oddness, that it is properly considered to contain a fallacy! After all, sometimes it really is the case, for various reasons, that some endeavour is only worth doing if total success can be achieved, and not worth the downsides if you can only succeed partially. No doubt if someone really held the allegedly fallacious view described, they would believe affirmative action is exactly such an endeavour and be able to explain why!
> Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics.
I wish I could find the source, but the vast majority of universities don't have a fixed admissions quota. They are criteria based (if you meet the criteria, you get in). In principle, AA admissions did not prevent others from getting a seat.
Of course, it's possible the general admissions criteria is raised slightly to compensate, but again - for most universities, AA admissions wasn't a significant number, and however much the bar raised, it was likely minuscule.
I'll be blunt. Everyone I've personally known who didn't get admissions in a particular university and blamed AA for it was trying to get into a top school, and likely didn't earn his spot.
I was more thrown off by their definition of "Coordination Problems" than anything. They say:
> We sometimes run into problems where a number of factors have to be addressed simultaneously in order for them to be effective at all. One weak link can ruin it for the rest. These are called Coordination Problems.
Coordination problems are about multiple actors choosing interdependent outcomes, rather than a problem that needs everything to be done right. This sounds more like a "Weakest Link" problem than a coordination problem.
Not that it invalidates the rest of the post, but it did make me dig in more into the person's background and showed that they're more of a journalist than a game theory expert.
Yeah, they are assuming that different actors are responsible for those different links, probably with different incentives. And it is also a resource allocation problem.
It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process. You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks, and anonymous interviews having higher rates of hire and such.
Due to this, people considered affirmative actions to correct for this skew. That would actually make it a meritocratic motivated AA.
And then you have the idea of missed potential. Those who weren't given the opportunity to develop, it limits the pool of exceptional candidates. It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process, but we were artificially limiting those with potential. The challenge is bigger here, so you need a bootstrapping process, because you're faced with a chicken and egg situation. You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect. I admit that this is the more controversial one, as it means temporarily favoring disadvantaged groups to bootstrap things. I just wanted to point out that there's a meritocratic angle to it as well.
Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.
> It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process.
A meritocratic process by definition is not prejudiced or biased. There were studies that claimed to show processes to not actually be meritocratic. In my experience, these findings either haven't reproduced or don't appropriately account for confounders; and if they held up they would be pointing at things that are already illegal (and irrational).
> It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process
What? How do you come to the conclusion that "we" thought any such thing? The term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy) was coined in the 50s for socialist criticism invoking satire. The discourse had nothing to do with race and was about disputing how merit is measured, not about supposed prejudices (except perhaps class privilege). Nor did coaches, managers etc. imagine any inferiority on the part of black athletes in regards to physical prowess. Segregation was to keep the peace; see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_color_line :
> Before the 1860s Civil War, black players participated in the highest levels of baseball.[2] During the war, baseball rose to prominence as a way to bring soldiers from various regions of the country together. In the aftermath of the war, baseball became a tool for national reconciliation; due to the racial issues involved in the war, baseball's unifying potential was mainly pursued among white Americans.[3]
Anyway,
> You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect.
This time lapse isn't required for a moral judgment, however.
> Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.
An employer, or a college admissions officer, cannot provide what was missing from someone's "environment" during the formative years, and should not be expected to try; nor ought they shoulder the risk of anyone's "full potential" being absent. Everyone might as well hire randomly from the general population at that point.
>The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
A lot of proponents of affirmative action will agree with this. They'll explicitly acknowledge that people admitted under AA will be underqualified, due to factors mentioned in the article:
[Minorities] may lack foundational skills (taken for granted in more affluent households and schools) and therefore might require breaks from study, which can lead to dropping out. They might have developed unhelpful habits or attitudes formed in teen years, or a sense of identity tied up with being part of a historically maligned group, affecting confidence and performance. [Affirmative action] does nothing to address these factors.
Said proponents would agree that AA is a failure if assessed strictly by these criteria. However, they would then go on to say that the benefits conferred by an elite education to the current crop of AA beneficiaries lead to future generations of minorities being less likely to experience the aforementioned issues, so after accounting for all future externalities, AA is a net good. As Justice O'Connor famously wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) [0],
It would be a sad day indeed, were America to become a quota-ridden society, with each identifiable minority assigned proportional representation in every desirable walk of life. But that is not the rationale for programs of preferential treatment; the acid test of their justification will be their efficacy in eliminating the need for any racial or ethnic preferences at all. […] It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education [California v. Bakke (1978)]. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
That said, it's been almost 25 years since she wrote that (and 50 years since California v. Bakke), and it's debatable whether those future externalities have manifested.
And many against affirmative action will agree that there have been massive historical injustices for certain demographics that have lingering effects. The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.
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 it, not my belief. The argument for AA is that the so-called meritocracy had/has its own unequal distributions.
>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.
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.
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.
This discourse in the comments reminded me of co-operative game strategies, a multi-party Prisoner's dilemma in some sense. If you want to see this in action amongst a group of individuals, you might enjoy this game by Tom Scott [1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJSI7QTAt_o
One thing I have always thought was missing in game theory (and it is probably there but I just haven't looked hard enough) is a mathematical framework for how to build trust to increase the infinite payout for everyone. If in the decision making the idea of an offering is added in then it brings up the possibility of gauging trust and building trust so that future actions can capture more value until an optimal infinite policy is attained. So, for instance, I look at all my possible options and I choose one based on how much I trust the other party AND how much I want to increase that trust in the future. So I give them an offering, select an option that gives them a little more but at a cost to me, to prove that I am willing to increase trust. If they reciprocate then I loose nothing and the next offering can be bigger. If they don't then I gained knowledge and my next offering is smaller. Basically, this is like tit for tat but over time and intended to get to the optimal solution instead of the min max solution. Clearly I'm not a mathematician, but I bet this could be refined to exact equations and formalized so that exact offerings could be calculated.
With an optimal way of determining fair splitting of gains like Shapley value[0] you can cooperate or defect with a probability that maximizes other participants expected value when everyone act fairly.
The ultimatum game is the simplest example; N dollars of prize to split, N/2 is fair, accept with probability M / (N /2) where M is what's offered to you; the opponents maximum expected value comes from offering N/2; trying to offer less (or more) results in expected value to them < N/2.
Trust can be built out of clearly describing how you'll respond in your own best interests in ways that achieve fairness, e.g. assuming the other parties will understand the concept of fairness and also act to maximize their expected value given their knowledge of how you will act.
If you want to solve logically harder problems like one-shot prisoners dilemma, there are preliminary theories for how that can be done by proving things about the other participants directly. It won't work for humans, but maybe artificial agents. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.5577
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_value
Thanks. I'll take a look!
There's certainly academic work about game theory and reputation. Googling "reputation effects in repeated games" shows some mentions in university game theory courses. There's also loads of work about how to incentivizing actors to be truthful (e.g. when reviewing peers or products).
Signaling theory (in evolutionary biology) might also be vaguely related.
This is the TCP backoff algorithm, specifically the slow start to find the optimal bandwidth. In your analogy, it would find the optimal amount that a person is willing to reciprocate.
Not only does this algorithm exist, but we're using it to communicate right now!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control
I have noticed this algorithm in many places which is why I think it is a missing piece in game theory and why formalizing it could be powerful. People use this instinctively in their interactions with others and algorithms (like the one you pointed out) have been created using the basic concept so a formalization of the math is likely in order. Consider the question of how big the offering should be. What if all parties are actually getting the optimum result, what mechanism stops the increase/why? Does it stop? Could this lead to both parties paying the other larger and larger sums forever? It is a fun thing to think about at least.
2 replies →
Look into cooperative game theory. If I remember correctly, trust is modelled as a way of exchanging information and influencing the probabilities that other players place on your next action
Nature already solved that and implemented it. It's all around us with relationships. Not just among humans. They typically last over a single interaction. Especially if you don't ignore the rules of the game.
But the game theory of nature also leaves room for other sort of players to somehow win over fair play. I thought this was a bug but over time realised it is a feature, critical to making players as a whole stronger. Without it there would be no point for anyone to be creative.
If you can solve the issue and make a playbook so that everyone do tic for tac, it won't take long for a bad actor to exploit it, then more, then you are back to where we are now.
I think this comes down to the fact that we can keep a mental ledger on the reputations of 50–100 people, so our in-built reputation system breaks down at the current scale.
You could try building a social credit system to scale things up, but that tends to upset people...
1 reply →
Do you have an example of this in mind where the known "tit for tat" strategy falls short?
I don't have a concrete example, but I think you can invent plenty of iterated prisoner's dilemmas with whatever modified rules and variables and find 'tit-for-tat' isn't the end-all-be-all. Like it changes things if there's an infinite or an unknown number of rounds, some of the defects are 'noise', etc.,.
Economist here (but not a game theorist): Repeated games are actually really hard to find closed form equilibria for in general. Additionally, many repeated games have multiple equilibria which makes every bit of follow on analysis that much more annoying. Only very specific categories of repeated game have known nice unique solutions like you are hoping for, and even then usually only under some idealized information set structure. But as other commenters have said, this is an active area of research in Economics and many grad classes are offered on it.
I wouldn't put so much stock in a mathematical model like game theory.
Humanity has accomplished a lot with the notion of number, quantity, and numerical model, but in nearly all these cases our success relies on the heavy use of assumptions and more importantly constraints—most models are actually quite poor when it comes to a Laplacean dream of fully representing everything one might care about in practice.
Unfortunately I think our successes tends to lead individuals to overestimate the value and applicability of abstract models. Human beings are not automatons and human behavior is so variable and vast that I highly doubt any mathematical model could ever really account for it in sufficient detail. Worse, there's a definite quantum problem. The moment you report on predicted behaviors according to your model, human beings can respond to those reports, changing their own behaviors and totally ruining your model by blowing the constraints out of the water.
I actually believe that many of humanity's contemporary social issues actually stem from overreliance on mathematical models with respect to understanding human behavior and making decisions about economics and governance. The more we can directly acquire insight into individuals rather than believe in their "revealed preferences" the better off we'll be if we really want a system in which people's direct wants are represented (rather than telling them "you say you want X but when I give you only Y as choice you choose Y so you must want Y"—it's totally idiotic).
Loving the blog in both style and content, hope to have time to read more in the future!
A random note in case Non-Zero-Sum James is looking: It's frustrating that reading footnotes[0] requires scrolling back and finding your previous place. A link from the footnote back to the original place in the text or something that reveals a footnote in-place (e.g. on hover) is fairly universal and very helpful!
[0] e.g. https://nonzerosum.games/emergencespirals.html#notes
FYI your browser back button should bring you back where you were.
Looks really nice! However, the rss feed seems broken. Probably a missing/malformed character somewhere
The link to the RSS feed gets put on your clipboard when you click it.
The article on "effortocracy"[1] is pretty very well done. Quoting the end of the article:
"... if you take anything away from this, it is to recognise that if meritocracy is based on achievement only, then we must be sure not to confuse it with effortocracy when it comes to its moral weight."
Related reading: The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel (I was hoping the article would reference this, and it does.)
[1] https://nonzerosum.games/effortocracy.html
I don't think we actually want an effortocracy. Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement? There's no inherent moral worth to futile effort that doesn't actually yield any reward, regardless of how laborious it might be.
This is further complicated by the difference between direct and indirect value. I build a thing that produces n value and is directly attributable to me. I also do things that help 100 others produce 10% more value themselves but most of that is attributed to themselves producing 10 * n value overall. How will I be rewarded if at all? Most likely as someone who produced n value.
3 replies →
> Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement?
Of course that would be ridiculous. You're trivializing the author's point. I'm not sure you've actually read the article in full. The author admits the difficulty in measuring it and that we may have to rely on "non-scientific" measurements.
Many of the tech robber barons and VCs (who call themselves "angels") carry the air of "my winnings are entirely of my own making". They rarely acknowledge the role of good fortune (in various aspects) in any meaningful way.
They inhale their success too deeply, as Michael Sandel memorably puts it.
1 reply →
Then why do we have books on grit? And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?
9 replies →
To strong-man their argument, they don't seem to be arguing to reward effort only, in their words:
> "To truly measure and reward by an effortocratic measure we need both a top-down and bottom-up approach
- At the top, reward people who have overcome more to get to the same point
- At the bottom, level the playing field so that potential, wherever it is, can be realised"
The way I think of it is using a vector analogy. They're arguing that a meritocracy only reward the end point, and that instead we should value both the magnitude of the vector in addition to its end point. You're interpreting effortocracy (not unfairly IMO) as only rewarding the magnitude of the vector, which is indeed absurd.
In my opinion however, they themselves are straw-manning what they point to as "moral meritocracy". As I understand it, their main gripe is that achievements are not only rewarded, but also ascribed higher moral weight, which is plain false. People vastly prefer rag-to-riches story to born-rich ones. So much so that you have many rich people straight up lying about their origin stories to make it sound more rag-to-riches than it is.
Edit: removed last bit that was harsher than intended.
But we do do that. People scream from the rooftops that it's unfair to give people money for doing nothing (i.e. welfare or UBI) but it's fine to give the same money to someone who digs ditches all day, and to someone else who fills in ditches. As long as a CEO is involved, for some reason. All of Graeber's bullshit jobs are effortocracy.
Well, i would say that there are two common fallacies w.r.t. meritocracy:
1) Mixing up merit (ability to provide achievement) with effort.
2) Assuming it has anything to do with moral weight. While it primarily targets just decision making and distribution of deserts (rewards).
Why distribution of deserts should be meritocratic? Because that ensure that collaboration is positive-sum for everybody involved. Considering this, fair reward for participation in some group effort has to satisfy a condition that reward is at least as large as a missed opportunity (of collaborating in some other group, individually, or not collaborating at all).
I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.
Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.
Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.
The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.
It's probably a good thing that James isn't zero sum, since otherwise he would have an evil twin out there somewhere trying to get people to be more selfish.
I'm a sucker for anything with game theory in the title. Can't wait to read more; thanks for sharing!
A bit hard to read but some fun images and examples. I appreciated his post on capitalism as not a zero sum game.
Capitalism is 100% a zero sum game and capitalists love to try to pretend that it’s not
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
>The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
The article explicitly addresses this:
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434065
18 replies →
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.
15 replies →
This website seems really well made, and the posts are interesting, thanks for sharing!
I personally found the text hard to read (both because of the typeface and the small size), the animations distracting during scrolling (while I'm trying to skim the content), and the background colors too dark for dark text on them with jarring full white (#FFF) colored text.
I understand they're trying to go for a whimsical and fun feeling, but imo as implemented it is far from "really well made".
I don't mind the layout and colours but it stutters when scrolling - or are those pointless animations?
The 3D tetris is genius
I liked it too, especially the presentation, although I'm not sure what I think about "leftovers" falling down.
Perhaps you'd like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockout .
Yours sincerely, a TGM-fan
RSS feed is broken
The only way for cooperation to be a winning strategy in a prisoner's dilemma is if people have memory/reputation/trust. However, that is very difficult to build in the modern digital world where everyone is a faceless username.
https://nonzerosum.games/cooperationvsdefection.html
Computers make it easy to track such things. eBay's success -- enabling strangers throughout the world to trade with confidence -- was built on it.
Sure, it worked and then it stopped working. Upvotes, reviews, social media, and word-of-mouth have been co-opted by advertising and marketing.
One failure mode is when someone makes 1000 accounts and upvotes everything that benefits them and downvotes everything that doesn't. And you have to balance letting new users into the system with not letting the same user into the system twice, and with not requiring a picture of each user's passport. Or some orange guy convinced 1000 people that what's good for him is objectively good and what's bad for him is objectively bad and facts aren't real and words don't have meanings, which has the same effect as a user with 1000 accounts, but even scanning passports won't help you.
Wow!. Such an original piece of "non-AI slop" content in a long time. Kudos for making this as I myself tipping my toes to explore this concept after hearing about it from multiple sources(Naval Ravikant incl). Thanks for making this and looking forward to more podcast episodes. Cheers
I'm still exploring the content, but that website is very pretty. It's nice to see something that stands out between all the copy-and-paste AI slop.
Personally I clicked off because the fonts appear to be something like comic sans, it is a chore to read.
Just aesthetically one of the worst websites I have ever seen.
It is obviously impossible to engage with every single idea proposed at once, but I think the main thrust of the argument is encapsulated in
>"Personally, I feel like the world might be a happier, more cooperative place if situations were by default framed as Stag Hunts."
Which is just so bizarrely and obviously false. Especially when just sentences before the issue of climate change came up, which certainly is not a positive sum game and we would be lucky if it was a zero sum game, but given all evidence it is very obviously a negative sum game, where governments get to talk about who has to bear the most pain. (And it isn't clear that cooperation even is the best opportunity for survival)
The optimism strikes me as so blindingly naive that it makes it hard to take anything said seriously. Maybe this is just a generational divide, many of the older people I know, in their 40s or older, seem much more optimistic about the state of the world. And the attempt to justify affirmative action is just so bizarre. If historic grievances are legitimate arguments for preferential treatment, then you will never get me to accept that this is anything but a brutal race to the bottom, which is about who can make the other suffer most. No, the world is not a positive sum game and I will never live under the delusion that it is.
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 people who tolerate abuse often seem to show disrespect and look down on good, honest people. I cannot overstate how powerful this effect is; and it seems to be getting worse over time! And these people keep coming up with narratives to gaslight themselves about their abusers "they're not so bad"... People will especially do this when their abuser has power over them (Stockholm Syndrome).
Once you factor these two things, cheating is the clear winning strategy. By a mile... It's objectively a superior strategy. If we just follow game theory; it will take us somewhere really dark. Game theory isn't what's keeping the world civilized. Society literally all rests on people's irrational emotions and moral principles.
The desire to do the right thing is completely irrational and is a net loss to the individual. If we continue with the current system and current assumptions, all moral individuals will be wiped out because they are at a HUGE disadvantage. To solve our social problems, we need to be more moral; we need to learn to judge ourselves and other people through the lens of morality and be very firm about it.
Writing from Japan. You are absolutely right about the "Finite Game". If you can reset your reputation and start over, "Cheating" is indeed the winning strategy.
However, here in Japan, we have a different operating system called "Shinise" (companies lasting over 1,000 years). They play an "Infinite Game". Their reputation is tied to a "Noren" (shop curtain) or a family name that has been built over centuries. You cannot simply discard it and respawn.
There is a movie hitting theaters here in Tokyo right now called "KOKUHO" (National Treasure). It depicts Kabuki actors who inherit a "Name" (Myoseki) with 400 years of history. Watching it, I realized: In their world, cheating doesn't just mean losing a job. It means "killing the Name" for all ancestors and future generations. The penalty is infinite.
When the "Reset Button" is removed from the game, "Honesty" and "Sanpo-yoshi" (Three-way satisfaction) naturally become the mathematically dominant strategies. Cheating only works when you plan to exit.
> It means "killing the Name" for all ancestors and future generations. The penalty is infinite.
Which is ironic, given Japan's abysmal fertility. That is the ultimate name killer. Lineages that have survived from the beginning, gone.
So... how does a new person open a shop?
1 reply →
Japan having the most insane, high effort culture in the world is exactly why they are continuing to slowly die by lack of fertility. Same with South Korea.
Japan will either lose its traditional culture including this long term aversion to "cheating", or they will lose their nation. It's existential and their refusal to embrace globalism will destroy them.
Zero sum game, and yes they (ZSGs) do actually exist nearly everywhere in real life and are the norm. I can't physically be in the same place as another person. Time spent on one action is time not spent on everything else. Every bit of food I eat is food denied from every other person.
4 replies →
> 1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.
True, but this is a necessary feature of a society or workplace to discourage cheating and abuse.
If a person could easily shed their reputation and start over on an equal footing with everyone else, cheating would be a zero-cost option. Cheat until you get caught, then start over and repeat.
This is why trust and reputation are built over time and are so valuable. It’s frustrating for newcomers or those who have lost reputation somehow, but it’s a necessary feature to discourage fraud and cheating.
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-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture). Broad collaboration and institution building is always the only way out of the hole, although the hole can be very deep and collaboration can be very costly until you get out.
You are right though, that for an individual living in a good collaborative system, often cheating is very effective, it's just that the system can only handle a certain amount of that behavior before it collapses.
As is discussed in the first scene of Plato's The Republic (surprisingly entertaining to modern tastes), the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just". If people are going to be assholes, it is actually much better if they are discrete about it and keep a pretense of civilization. When people start acting conspicuously like assholes, out of a weird sense of honesty, that's when it propagates and the whole thing collapses, like a bank-run. It's an ancient story that we are still living.
> Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints
Sometimes highly shrewd rich countries infiltrate the power structure of poor countries through N-pronged strategy to keep them stuck in a rut so that they don't become future threat, also extract their resources in the meantime.
3 replies →
> 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.
5 replies →
> 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. Employees turning a blind eye to the immoral actions of their boss and coming up with justifications to keep them on a pedestal...
The social structure is not determined by morality; it's the other way round; morality is determined by the social structure.
It reminds me of an old French fable in which a lamb tries to reason with a wolf why he should let him live... The wolf listens to the lamb's logic but then he eats it anyway and the story ends with a sentence like "The reason of the strongest is always the best one."
4 replies →
Re: Plato/Socrates
"Therefore Socrates said that it wasn’t enough to use the intellect in all things, but it was important to know for which cause one was exerting it. We would now say: One must serve the “good cause.” But to serve the good cause is—to be moral. Thus, Socrates is the founder of ethics.
"Socrates opened this war, and its peaceful end does not occur until the dying day of the old world."
Plato/Socrates are the original ghost story tellers. I spit on their grave. Republic is easily one of the worst books written in human history in terms of its impact. Right up there with Das Kapital.
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 it's really the fact that cooperation is so powerful and pervasive that makes it normal to the point where any deviation from it feels outrageous.
So you focus on the outrageous due to availability bias (seeing the trees rather than the forest).
You seem to be misunderstanding the GP.
Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.
5 replies →
[dead]
[flagged]
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 the concepts out of existing structures without acknowledging any of the foundational structures or any of the epistemological Foundations of the claims.
My primary problem with it is that it sneaks in a bunch of factually incorrect and problematic concepts like the idea of capitalism as win-win which has been thoroughly debunked by Proudhon in “What is Property” and expanded on by Graeber in his book Debt
2 replies →
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" demographics. The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
[1]: https://nonzerosum.games/unlockingsolutions.html
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.
Even if some critics of AA are committing that fallacy, debunking a weaker argument when a stronger argument exists is ineffective.
The implicit argument is that AA's largest challenge is a coordination problem. It's not. It's a clash in values and a fight over zero-sum rewards.
3 replies →
> Do you disagree that some critics of AA are committing that fallacy?
This is is such a weird non-argument dressed as some gotcha. "Some critics of x are committing y fallacy" is probably universally correct statement. It is so devoid of any meaning that this particular type of discourse has not only a name, but a mascot too.
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
If what skibidithink says is true, doesn't it mean that it's not a fallacy at all? And that the failure he identifies does undermine the entire thing?
Either way, seems like a very narrow distinction you are drawing when he is making the meatier claim that affirmative action is fundamentally flawed.
1 reply →
>Indeed, I'm sure the author would agree that part of the comprehensive solution is to increase the amount of university admission slots.
A large part of the value of elite education is its scarcity, and adding more slots dilutes that value.
2 replies →
I certainly claim that almost nobody "commits" that "fallacy" and that it is not a remotely notable viewpoint in the civic discourse of any country I know about.
No doubt in a world of 8 billion people, there exists someone, somewhere, who has for some reason voiced the belief described - i.e. that if institutions really heavily based their selection of applicants on skin color rather than merit, that would be good, but that because in reality institutions have only been convinced to somewhat compromise on merit-based selection in favour of skin-color-based selection, it's bad, and should thus be abandoned completely in favour of total meritocracy. But that belief would really be rather odd, and I have never seen it expressed even once in my entire life.
Nor am I convinced, despite its oddness, that it is properly considered to contain a fallacy! After all, sometimes it really is the case, for various reasons, that some endeavour is only worth doing if total success can be achieved, and not worth the downsides if you can only succeed partially. No doubt if someone really held the allegedly fallacious view described, they would believe affirmative action is exactly such an endeavour and be able to explain why!
1 reply →
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.
It's only positive sum if they grew because of affirmative action. And if affirmative action caused net friction, it'd be a Moloch.
2 replies →
University admission is arguably bad for society.
(See Caplan's Case Against Education.)
> Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics.
I wish I could find the source, but the vast majority of universities don't have a fixed admissions quota. They are criteria based (if you meet the criteria, you get in). In principle, AA admissions did not prevent others from getting a seat.
Of course, it's possible the general admissions criteria is raised slightly to compensate, but again - for most universities, AA admissions wasn't a significant number, and however much the bar raised, it was likely minuscule.
I'll be blunt. Everyone I've personally known who didn't get admissions in a particular university and blamed AA for it was trying to get into a top school, and likely didn't earn his spot.
CA Prop 209 is a good natural experiment: https://reappropriate.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Total-UC...
4 replies →
I was more thrown off by their definition of "Coordination Problems" than anything. They say:
> We sometimes run into problems where a number of factors have to be addressed simultaneously in order for them to be effective at all. One weak link can ruin it for the rest. These are called Coordination Problems.
Coordination problems are about multiple actors choosing interdependent outcomes, rather than a problem that needs everything to be done right. This sounds more like a "Weakest Link" problem than a coordination problem.
Not that it invalidates the rest of the post, but it did make me dig in more into the person's background and showed that they're more of a journalist than a game theory expert.
Yeah, they are assuming that different actors are responsible for those different links, probably with different incentives. And it is also a resource allocation problem.
It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process. You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks, and anonymous interviews having higher rates of hire and such.
Due to this, people considered affirmative actions to correct for this skew. That would actually make it a meritocratic motivated AA.
And then you have the idea of missed potential. Those who weren't given the opportunity to develop, it limits the pool of exceptional candidates. It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process, but we were artificially limiting those with potential. The challenge is bigger here, so you need a bootstrapping process, because you're faced with a chicken and egg situation. You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect. I admit that this is the more controversial one, as it means temporarily favoring disadvantaged groups to bootstrap things. I just wanted to point out that there's a meritocratic angle to it as well.
Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.
You are stawmanning. You are attempting to say what they think meritocracy is - and your basing your thoughts on your own stereotypes.
> You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks
That is not meritocracy.
2 replies →
> It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process.
A meritocratic process by definition is not prejudiced or biased. There were studies that claimed to show processes to not actually be meritocratic. In my experience, these findings either haven't reproduced or don't appropriately account for confounders; and if they held up they would be pointing at things that are already illegal (and irrational).
> It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process
What? How do you come to the conclusion that "we" thought any such thing? The term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy) was coined in the 50s for socialist criticism invoking satire. The discourse had nothing to do with race and was about disputing how merit is measured, not about supposed prejudices (except perhaps class privilege). Nor did coaches, managers etc. imagine any inferiority on the part of black athletes in regards to physical prowess. Segregation was to keep the peace; see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_color_line :
> Before the 1860s Civil War, black players participated in the highest levels of baseball.[2] During the war, baseball rose to prominence as a way to bring soldiers from various regions of the country together. In the aftermath of the war, baseball became a tool for national reconciliation; due to the racial issues involved in the war, baseball's unifying potential was mainly pursued among white Americans.[3]
Anyway,
> You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect.
This time lapse isn't required for a moral judgment, however.
> Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.
An employer, or a college admissions officer, cannot provide what was missing from someone's "environment" during the formative years, and should not be expected to try; nor ought they shoulder the risk of anyone's "full potential" being absent. Everyone might as well hire randomly from the general population at that point.
1 reply →
>The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
A lot of proponents of affirmative action will agree with this. They'll explicitly acknowledge that people admitted under AA will be underqualified, due to factors mentioned in the article:
Said proponents would agree that AA is a failure if assessed strictly by these criteria. However, they would then go on to say that the benefits conferred by an elite education to the current crop of AA beneficiaries lead to future generations of minorities being less likely to experience the aforementioned issues, so after accounting for all future externalities, AA is a net good. As Justice O'Connor famously wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) [0],
That said, it's been almost 25 years since she wrote that (and 50 years since California v. Bakke), and it's debatable whether those future externalities have manifested.
[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/
And many against affirmative action will agree that there have been massive historical injustices for certain demographics that have lingering effects. The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.
2 replies →
Singapore does the whole "race based quotas for everything" and they have by many metrics, the best standard of living in the entire world.
It turns out that the government forcing racial integration actually works! Being a "quota ridden society" would be good for America.
1 reply →
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 it, not my belief. The argument for AA is that the so-called meritocracy had/has its own unequal distributions.
>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.
2 replies →
University admission is a zero-sum already deeply unfair game (with slots going to the rich and privileged)
AA just pushes against THAT, for better or worse.
AA doesn't prevent the rich from buying admissions. It redistributes slots from middle and lower class folks with the wrong ethnicity.
3 replies →
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.
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.
> 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...