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My point was not about nature though, rather it was about being sustainable. Looking at the classic prisoner's dilemma, there are activities which bring localiz

My point was not about nature though, rather it was about being sustainable. Looking at the classic prisoner's dilemma, there are activities which bring localized benefit, but an overall loss in a non-zero-sum game. Presuming that human activity is not zero-sum regarding whatever system of values we take, it's clear cut that some activities are bad, period. This makes the grandparent's examples clearer: coal production benefits some people now but hurts future generations disproportionately. Wars hurt all sides, and allow some of them partially recover, and never as far as if they joined forces. Car companies throw the whole semiconductor industry under the bus in exchange for not having to keep inventory. In a huge simplification, it's self-destruction I'm talking about, not sacrificing little things to gain greater ones, like exchanging the lives of insects to feed a human cvilization (presuming you value humans more). Of course, it's possible to construct an arbitrary system of values to justify your own arbitrary deeds as "survival" or "natural", but I don't find such systems convincing.

lazide 6y ago
Nature is the only known example we have of a sustained environment, no? Everything else is artificially constructed, and no social or artificial environment I know of has lasted in any meaningfully sustained and stable way for more than a few generations. My point is that you are constructing your own arbitrary system relying on projections of the results of actions far into the future, and impacts that are purely hypothetical at this point - they might be true/accurate, or they might not. Someone is staking their own success or happiness based on if they think it’s true or not, and I can point you to many examples in the recent past where that was a severe evolutionary negative for many people. Prisoners dilemma is a thought experiment/theoretical problem because in the real world, what people value, their own understanding of and perceived trustworthiness of others, and their own dispositions and habits means it might as well be talking about spherical cows. If we get into a shooting war with China next year for instance, global warming is going to be pretty low on the problematic outcomes one could face. If a pile of coal (or billion barrels of oil) is what it takes for the US (or China, or any other nation) to survive, they will burn it without a moments hesitation. We can all hand wring about if that hurts the global balance, and how it’s terrible, and game theory and all that - but if it’s a fight for dominance, survival, and resources it won’t matter. So far we’ve found enough common ground/everyone is getting rich enough helping each other out it hasn’t come to that. We can hope it never will. Pretending that folks who are building tools, or capabilities, or working in the areas that would be necessary to survive if something like that happened seems willfully ignorant of the reality we’re in or incredibly naive, IMO. Some folks make short sighted choices, lose a ton of money, screw people over (intentionally or not), etc. In my experience it’s usually due to environmental factors (regulation, market, competitive forces) strongly incentivizing it, or just plain not being able to predict the future. That chaos and dumbness is not only inevitable, it happens everywhere. It’s fundamental to the human experience. It’s easy to be high and mighty, much harder to do it differently - and survive.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  > Nature is the only known example we have of a sustained environment, no? No, not really. Looking at the large scale, the Earth will burn up together with the Sun, and then we'll reach the death of the universe one way or the other. Small scale, we have sustained businesses, economies, families, ecosystems. In those, prisoner's dilemma is real and testable. I'm getting the impression that you're trying to draw some equivalency between all classes of harms, regardless of their magnitude. I do agree to a certain extent, but I can nary see an argument that would convince me that some options are just not singularly harmful. As an example, me and my neighbour being paid to grow a field, at the cost of the field insects, versus me and my neighbour being paid to drive each other away and take over the land. One is clearly better than another if human well being is more important than that of insects. If we fear the neighbour fighting us and we value survival, we must fight ourselves. That's the curse of the prisoner's dilemma, because giving up the fight yields a better outcome. I would call such a greedy "survival" approach naive and unfortunate. If we value dominance above all, then fighting the neighbour is the better choice. I believe we have a word for such value systems: egoism.
  - lazide 6y ago
    Giving up the fight yields the better outcome only when the other party doesn’t come over and eat you or kill you no? It isn’t about dominance over all - it’s about survival and the complex intertwining of all the various strategies (good, bad, failing) being tried simultaneously with the hope that theirs wins. Sometimes it’s domination. Sometimes it’s teamwork. Sometimes it’s passivity. As any individual player, you have to pick one - and sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses. Most strategies exist not because they are always ideal, but because having the selection is essential and necessary to long term survival in a fundamentally unpredictable environment. A species that only does one strategy at once is going to go extinct when the environment changes suddenly. I’m definitely not equating all actions as equal, or saying everything has equal cost. I’m noting that nothing, including no action, has no cost, and that assuming a player in the game (you or someone else) will definitely lose or definitely win for a given survival criteria has a very low degree of predictive accuracy in the real world.

lazide 6y ago

Nature is the only known example we have of a sustained environment, no? Everything else is artificially constructed, and no social or artificial environment I know of has lasted in any meaningfully sustained and stable way for more than a few generations. My point is that you are constructing your own arbitrary system relying on projections of the results of actions far into the future, and impacts that are purely hypothetical at this point - they might be true/accurate, or they might not. Someone is staking their own success or happiness based on if they think it’s true or not, and I can point you to many examples in the recent past where that was a severe evolutionary negative for many people. Prisoners dilemma is a thought experiment/theoretical problem because in the real world, what people value, their own understanding of and perceived trustworthiness of others, and their own dispositions and habits means it might as well be talking about spherical cows. If we get into a shooting war with China next year for instance, global warming is going to be pretty low on the problematic outcomes one could face. If a pile of coal (or billion barrels of oil) is what it takes for the US (or China, or any other nation) to survive, they will burn it without a moments hesitation. We can all hand wring about if that hurts the global balance, and how it’s terrible, and game theory and all that - but if it’s a fight for dominance, survival, and resources it won’t matter. So far we’ve found enough common ground/everyone is getting rich enough helping each other out it hasn’t come to that. We can hope it never will. Pretending that folks who are building tools, or capabilities, or working in the areas that would be necessary to survive if something like that happened seems willfully ignorant of the reality we’re in or incredibly naive, IMO. Some folks make short sighted choices, lose a ton of money, screw people over (intentionally or not), etc. In my experience it’s usually due to environmental factors (regulation, market, competitive forces) strongly incentivizing it, or just plain not being able to predict the future. That chaos and dumbness is not only inevitable, it happens everywhere. It’s fundamental to the human experience. It’s easy to be high and mighty, much harder to do it differently - and survive.

rhn_mk1 6y ago
> Nature is the only known example we have of a sustained environment, no? No, not really. Looking at the large scale, the Earth will burn up together with the Sun, and then we'll reach the death of the universe one way or the other. Small scale, we have sustained businesses, economies, families, ecosystems. In those, prisoner's dilemma is real and testable. I'm getting the impression that you're trying to draw some equivalency between all classes of harms, regardless of their magnitude. I do agree to a certain extent, but I can nary see an argument that would convince me that some options are just not singularly harmful. As an example, me and my neighbour being paid to grow a field, at the cost of the field insects, versus me and my neighbour being paid to drive each other away and take over the land. One is clearly better than another if human well being is more important than that of insects. If we fear the neighbour fighting us and we value survival, we must fight ourselves. That's the curse of the prisoner's dilemma, because giving up the fight yields a better outcome. I would call such a greedy "survival" approach naive and unfortunate. If we value dominance above all, then fighting the neighbour is the better choice. I believe we have a word for such value systems: egoism.
- lazide 6y ago
  Giving up the fight yields the better outcome only when the other party doesn’t come over and eat you or kill you no? It isn’t about dominance over all - it’s about survival and the complex intertwining of all the various strategies (good, bad, failing) being tried simultaneously with the hope that theirs wins. Sometimes it’s domination. Sometimes it’s teamwork. Sometimes it’s passivity. As any individual player, you have to pick one - and sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses. Most strategies exist not because they are always ideal, but because having the selection is essential and necessary to long term survival in a fundamentally unpredictable environment. A species that only does one strategy at once is going to go extinct when the environment changes suddenly. I’m definitely not equating all actions as equal, or saying everything has equal cost. I’m noting that nothing, including no action, has no cost, and that assuming a player in the game (you or someone else) will definitely lose or definitely win for a given survival criteria has a very low degree of predictive accuracy in the real world.