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.
Conversation
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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How to do that? That’s for another thread.
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Replying to
Again, you need a context informed by an intention. You can’t have a sum of 1 element.

