Conversation

Take a random issue, and consider a *random* take on it. As in, derived by situating it in a context induced by a random intention. Like: issue = “is icecream good?” Contexts: taste, biology, health, insecurity, science, climate… Is the take likely to be zero or nonzero-sum?
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There’s not actually many natural zero-sum things around. Most natural phenomena are very clearly positive or negative sum. You kinda have to very carefully construct a very contrived context around a “take” to reach a zero-sum conclusion. Why?
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A random sincere take on a random topic is *mathematically* almost certainly non-zero sum. Intuition: there is only one point on the real number line corresponding to zero, but an uncountable infinite number of points that are nonzero sum.
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Strictly speaking the probability of two randomly chosen concerns having a zero-sum interaction is zero. Given 2 concerns close enough in time/space etc to interact, negative sum is most likely, positive sum next most likely, and zero-sum, zero likely. Yet humans love zero-sum
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Example: mix 2 random ingredients in the kitchen, will the result taste better, worse or equal to the sum of tastes in isolation. Eg sugar+sour = better than either in isolation, hence juice = positive sum sugar + spinach = negative sum at least for me
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Let’s contrive a zero-sum taste. Let’s say you like salt and sweet equally but in different ways, so if you mix the two in 1 tsp, more sugar points = fewer salt points. Zero-sum combo. I can’t think of any combo that actually behaves that way.
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There’s really only one thing that behaves in a zero-sum way: social status. So anyone proposing a zero-sum framing is almost certainly translating the given pair of concerns into a relative status concerns.
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Negative-sum (everybody loses) is actually a refreshingly interesting and common case, since it *can* in theory lead to consensus that something really dumb is going on, and it’s in in everybody’s interests to fix it… which they could if they stay with the problem.
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But cast it into a zero-sum frame via a contrived casting into a social status competition and… congrats, you’ve created a nearly impossibly rare distortion that nature barely ever creates. One that allows you to start ignoring the problem and simply fight the other person.
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This can be mathematized with iterated prisoner’s dilemma (hint: combine the PD payoff matrix P with its transpose P’ via a kinship variable Pnew = P + kP’ and vary k from -inf to +inf) but that’s kinda an unnecessary yakshave.
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The key intuition here is that the “zero-sum transform” is a way to turn any multi-dimensional problem (with say science, material, aesthetic dimensions) into a purely political problem that can be tackled by a) ignoring everything that’s not about status b) fighting for status
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It’s a separation of “human” and “non-human” parts via engineered degeneracy (of good/evil, ingroup/outgroup etc). In theory you a) defeat the other side utterly, b) then solve the newly simplified problem unilaterally
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In terms of “play the ball, not the man,” this is ad hominem as strategy. Throw away the ball and play *only* the man. It is a very effective and adaptive pattern, which is why our species evolved and perfected it as “politics.” Unfortunately it fails when the “ball” is too big
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When the bigger, harder, part of the problem is in the part you throw away while fighting zero-sum to solve it, you’re screwed. Like a plane is crashing while the 2 co-pilots argue about who should control. To first order this is how the Air France crash happened.
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So the way to solve problems that are being dragged into high-risk zero-sum fights is to do your best to put the “ball” back into play. Drag it back towards nonzero-sum. Not positive-sum necessarily (win-win). Even lose-lose (negative-sum) is better than zero-sum (win-lose)
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Related: This 2015 post by calls out the popularity of status-revision articles online. I’ve noticed it too. My most popular writing is status-revision writing too. Though mine tends to be satirical “everybody should be lowered in status”
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