NonZeroSumJames

The game that inspired nonzerosum.games is now finally out in the world, learn non-zero-sum thinking through play.

Most browsers have a reading mode button in the URL bar. Apparently these sorts of fonts are actually easier for people with dyslexia to read. But I'm more interested in creating a unified visual aesthetic that says—this is not a scientific paper, read at your own leisure / risk.

Yes, I don't advocate for this. I advocate for UBI, so we don't incentivise pointless jobs, and we give people the freedom to do meaningful work. I also advocate, once a UBI is established to do away with minimum wage, so that people can take on low-paid but meaningful work, putting their efforts toward something that generates actual social value rather than financial profit.

Each post can't describe my entire take on society absolutely, but taken with other posts on the site, I'd like to think it's fairly cohesive. I think subsidising industries for the sake of providing employment is pointless and unsustainable approach, it undermines both a genuine source of meaning for people and it undermines the market (making goods more expensive).

There's quite a lot of positive-sum energy the enters the environment from the giant nuclear reactor in the sky, which we have a few billion years lease on.

Money may be constant-sum but that doesn't mean what you can purchase with that money is constant, new markets emerge, others become more efficient. Many positive-sum systems are possible within a universe that is on-the-whole zero-sum.

Some of us would be advocating for this, but at present there are many who refer to taxes as theft because they take money from wealthy "deserving" people and give it to poor "undeserving" people.

If we took the moral value away from meritocracy-as-indicated-by-wealth as it is, not giving it the bait-and-switch moral weight of a "well-directed efforts" Effortocracy, it would be less of an uphill political battle to level the playing field for those with great potential to contribute to society but who are currently locked out by poverty or other accidents of birth.

OP here: I'm not sure I advocate for "rewarding pointless, Sisyphean tasks", I even identify as a Utilitarian within the post. Effortocracy points to effort as a good predictor of future capabilities (when selecting from candidates for college acceptances or jobs). If person A and B have both achieved the same results, but person B has done so in the face of a much more difficult situation than person A, this is a good predictor that person B is likely to outperform person A in future. You can imagine this as a two lines on a graph: A beginning at 10 and B beginning at 5, at some point of time in the future when different levels of linear development lands both at 15, this means person B has been consistently improving at twice the rate of person A, which is likely to continue.

The same is true of moral character, which as the post points out is a better predictor of future behaviour than an absolute measure of prior contribution.

But the main takeaway is not how we assess people in the world as it is, but how do we set up the world in a way where everyone's efforts lead to their optimal potential merit, which is incentivised by rewarding effort at each step. Part of effort is also thinking about the effectiveness of your efforts, but also many efforts might be seen as pointless and futile until they are not, scientists who contributed to the Covid vaccine had been doing seemingly pointless work for decades until it finally became relevant to MRNA vaccines.

And on the other hand, it is entirely possible to put fairly low effort into profitable ventures that are detrimental to society—porn, alcohol, sugary foods and get rewarded for it. An effortocracy would seek to tweak the incentives differently.

A long way of saying "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

I love this response.

Thanks unholiness—fair point on the footnotes, I'll put that on my to-do list. As you can see, it's all very hand-made, so some of those basics are missed sometimes.

Thanks max-amb, it's a bit clunky in places.. but with a little crowd-sourced bug-fixing it's getting there!

I think I've fixed it now... it's working in my reader, please let me know if it's still not working for you.

Thanks ultrasounder!

While travelling in Tanzania, I noticed a few unique game-theoretical scenarios, most notably the driving in Arusha, which is basically a game of perpetual chicken, a surprisingly functional one. This post explores why it works.