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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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