1. gregladen
  2. Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

By gregladen on January 10, 2008.

Author Robert Wright explains "non-zero-sumness," a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the "game." Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress -- a move toward empathy -- is our only hope.

Tags
behavioral biology

More like this

Solving Tic-Tac-Toe: Game Tree Basics
Moving on from simple zero-sum games, there are a bunch of directions in which we can go. So far, the games we've looked at are very restrictive. Beyond the zero-sum property, they're built on a set of fundamental properties which ultimately reduce to the idea that no player ever has an…
Niches and theology
Science & Theology News has an article on "evolutionism" that is replete with historical errors and other misdemeanors. But it indicates some nuances of the evolutionary biological debates are starting to have some impact. The author, Gennaro Auletta, is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical…
Zero Sum Games
In game theory, perhaps the most important category of simple games is something called zero sum games. It's also one of those mathematical things that are widely abused by the clueless - you constantly hear references to the term "zero-sum game" in all sorts of contexts, and they're almost always…
Islamic science: contradiction of terms?
The headline for this week's current reading on the Island is perhaps unfair. It's become trite to point out that algebra and algorithm, to name just two mathematical terms, are derived from Muslim scholars. But as Taner Edis, the author of the book "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in…

The blurb misses the best thing about non-zero sum games - that people will cooperate under then even in the absence of altruism or empathy, since it is in their own interest to do so. Adam Smith said it best:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages.

Thus, even if appeals to decency or justice fall to make the case for peace, the appeal to self-interest persists - theoretically, there is always a negotiated outcome that's better than warfare for both parties.