Non-Zero-Sum Games

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Site design and usability

  • Visual design is widely noted as distinctive and “non-AI-slop,” with praise for creativity (e.g., 3D Tetris).
  • Several readers find the typography, small font, dark backgrounds, and scroll animations actively obstruct reading; some report stuttery performance.
  • Minor UX issues: broken RSS feed, awkward footnote navigation.

Cheating, cooperation, and human behavior

  • One line of discussion argues that models of cooperation underestimate how easy it is to reset reputation and how tolerant people are of abuse; with that assumption, cheating can look like the dominant real-world strategy.
  • Others counter that modern prosperity rests on vast collaboration and institutions that redirect selfishness into cooperative outcomes; cheating only scales as a minority strategy before it destabilizes the system.
  • Evolutionary arguments appear on both sides: some emphasize frequency-dependent selection where defection fails if too common; others stress inclusive fitness and cooperation emerging as robust across species.

Reputation, culture, and “infinite games”

  • A contrasting example is given from Japan: very long-lived firms and inherited “Names” create effectively infinite penalties for cheating, pushing honesty as the rational strategy.
  • Critics respond that such cultures may face demographic collapse, and that globally many real-world constraints (time, space, food) are inherently zero-sum.

Inequality, corruption, and trust

  • There’s debate over whether wealth and power flows mainly from collaboration or from abusive structures propped up by propaganda and distance from the oppressed.
  • Some claim poor countries are held back by low trust and “crab-bucket” dynamics; others dispute this, pointing to pay levels, institutional quality, and examples of corruption in rich countries.
  • A side thread questions data linking trust and GDP, and whether causation runs from trust to prosperity or vice versa.

Capitalism and zero-sum vs non-zero-sum

  • One camp insists capitalism is fundamentally zero-sum due to finite resources, ecological externalities, and thermodynamic constraints.
  • Others distinguish physical limits from economic value: services can be positive-sum, and the site’s own framing allows capitalism to be non-zero-sum yet still produce severe negative externalities.

Affirmative action, meritocracy, and effortocracy

  • The affirmative action piece draws heavy debate:
    • Critics say admissions and elite jobs are inherently zero-sum, so AA is explicitly redistributive and conflicts with meritocracy.
    • Some defenders argue the “meritocracy” it disrupts was already skewed by legacy, wealth, and bias; AA is framed as correcting historical and ongoing unfairness.
    • Others focus on a claimed fallacy: judging the whole enterprise a failure because one component (e.g., scholarships alone) doesn’t equalize outcomes, versus viewing it as a coordination problem needing multiple supports.
    • There’s disagreement over whether this fallacy is widespread or even a fallacy in context.
  • Several comments argue AA in practice often redistributes from lower- and middle-class applicants of “overrepresented” groups to relatively well-off applicants of “underrepresented” groups, and that class-based preferences would be fairer.
  • A related article on “effortocracy” (rewarding effort vs outcomes) is praised by some for its moral distinction, but others find it impractical:
    • Measuring effort fairly is seen as nearly impossible; attempts tend to substitute subjective biases for objective criteria.
    • Some note cultural glorification of “grit” may be more about comforting narratives than actual causal drivers of success.

Trust, repeated games, and formal models

  • Readers expand on the cooperation articles with discussion of:
    • Reputation systems (e.g., online marketplaces) as enablers of non-zero-sum cooperation, and how they can be gamed or co-opted.
    • The difficulty of modeling trust-building mathematically in repeated games; suggestions include cooperative game theory, Shapley values, and analogies to TCP congestion control (AIMD).
    • Economists note repeated games often have multiple equilibria and are technically hard, so clean closed-form prescriptions are rare.

Tone, optimism, and reception

  • Many enjoy the writing, breadth (Goodhart’s law, capitalism, merit/effort), and framing of non-zero-sum thinking.
  • Others see the overall stance—especially the desire to reframe conflicts as Stag Hunts and the defense of AA—as naively optimistic or divorced from harsh zero- or negative-sum realities (climate, power politics).
  • Overall, the project is viewed as intellectually ambitious and stylistically memorable, but polarizing on both aesthetics and politics.