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Cores distribute unpriced negative externalities in proportion to inability to resist. Frontiers distribute them in proportion to unwillingness to play.
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Core or frontier, the world is never fair. Yes there are people who will get screwed over at both loci. Quite frequently by people pretending to champion their cause.
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In civ cores, intelligence is adaptive because because uncaptured upside things are rare to non-existent by definition, so spotting scams is a net benefit by limiting losses. Intelligence also helps you win by "not playing" stable rigged games of zero-sum extraction.
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I'm mostly a creature of the core, but I realized long ago that successfully spotting and avoiding all the zillion exploitation traps at best adds up to not losing ground. You don't gain any. Cores are set up to reproduce starting positions generation after generation.
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A stagnant core has rising inequality precisely because 90% people are slowly losing ground through failing to avoid being extracted, 9% are maintaining position by "not playing", and a 1% minority is gaining ground.
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A frontier is essentially a social equivalent of a random number generator crossed with an amnesia machine. Inherited core advantages are sharply devalued, intelligence turns somewhat maladaptive, and mostly outcomes depend on being bold enough to play dumb luck games
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The outcome is still inequality, but it is not strongly *reproduced* inequality. The 90-9-1 distribution is not a strong function of the corresponding core distribution of the core that the frontier draws its population from.
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