6 ms·

As terrible and inefficient as it is, humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other at every level: international, national, local, interpersonal

As terrible and inefficient as it is, humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other at every level: international, national, local, interpersonal. United Earth would necessarily be a terrible, repressive thing going agains everything that our monkey brain stands for. That is, unless some more remote out-group appears, say United Colonies of Musk, or Lunar Robot Empire.

rbanffy 5y ago
As anyone who works with open source software can tell you, cooperation beats competition in the long run. Or, as the old saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”
- admissionsguy 5y ago
  > cooperation beats competition It would. A civilisation of intelligent ants would be unstoppable. But there is (currently) no way to make monkey-people cooperate at scale.
- hnbad 5y ago
  Cooperation is literally why we are humans. Individualism doesn't require the complex brains we have. Our brains are this complex because we evolved as a highly social species. We didn't hunt the megafauna as individual superwarriors, we hunted them as a group. If prehistoric megafauna was shown a zombie movie, it would recognize us as the zombies: there's too many of us and we never tire. They tried to sprint away but we jogged after them, hurling a dozen spears at them like death from a thousand paper cuts. Yes, we value excellence, but only because it brings us forward as a group. The goal of competing for being the best isn't to find out who's best but to encourage us all to be better.
  - admissionsguy 5y ago
    > Cooperation is literally why we are humans. Cooperation within the tribe. (Often violent) competition against the others. And the evolution of human intelligence was driven largely by the need to deceive, out-compete and achieve domination over others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligenc...
    - hnbad 5y ago
      Yes, tribal rivalries and fragmentation escalate when resources become scarce. Luckily we've solved that problem: housing, food and even luxury goods exist in abundance. It's important to keep in mind that even the "alpha wolf" phenomenon was only observed in captivity, while wolf packs roaming freely had a much more egalitarian dynamic. The reason we see ruthless competition everywhere is not that humans are naturally antagonistic, it's that we've created a superstructure that perpetually creates artificial scarcity and "hacks" our stress response. We know that this is true in the small: "limited offers", countdowns and "exclusive deals" are widely understood cheap marketing gimmicks. We even came up with a catchy acronym for this: FOMO, emphasis on "fear". We're less ready to acknowledge this exists in the large. We've become so accustomed to the so-called Great Man Theory and a Capitalist Realism lens of history that we struggle to even imagine a different version of prehistory than the violent struggle for survival we proposed under colonialism to justify our subjugation of the "savages" _for their own good_.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        > that we've created a superstructure that perpetually creates artificial scarcity and "hacks" our stress response. Capitalism extracts work from material scarcity gradients the same way a Stirling engine extracts it from temperature gradients.
- rop10 5y ago
  There are competing projects (gcc, clang) and there is competition within individual projects. If competition ceases or is discouraged, projects often morph into mindless corporate sponsored churn and unoriginal rewrites.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >If competition ceases or is discouraged, projects often morph into mindless corporate sponsored churn and unoriginal rewrites. Not true, this is some recent thing. KDE goes strong with few corporate support, the issue would be if some other projects gets unfair advantages so you get something with worse architecture and quality more popular. And with open source you do not see 10 kernels competing, you have a few and all the other kernels are toys or experiments. Why did US and Russia and the other worked together on the ISS? are they insane? would make more sense that each country creates it's own rocket, it's own space station , it's own telescopes and not collaborate ? Could be cases where cooperation can solve something and competition would be incapable of solving or would solve it but with much more costs (maybe human lives)?
simion314 5y ago
>monkey brain That is the issue, we need to kick down the "monkey brain" leaders. We need better education, we need better collaboration. Tribalism is stupid and wrong. I lve in a village, as an child I was told a lot of idiotic things like"people from X are Y..." and when I left for university and meet people from X I seen that they are not different then us, and I seen people from my region acting like idiots making me feel shame. Monkey brain is a problem, as a politician, CEO or sociophat you can exploit it on your advantage but as the whole humanity we need to admit is bad, is history and we are not wild beasts anymore, we need to have better expectation for ourselves.
- WJW 5y ago
  > That is the issue, we need to kick down the "monkey brain" leaders. I think you completely misunderstand the post you are replying to. It's not just the leaders, it is everyone. Even me, even you. There are heaps and heaps of research papers showing that this affects every single human and that the more you think you are immune from it, the bigger its impact on you.
  - simion314 5y ago
    I understand that, but humanity changed, like most of us now understand that race or nationality is irrelevant and you can't rank them. This is progress. Most of us understand that we can ignore religious differences and that is idiotic to kill the others because their religion differs in less then 1%, so from my point of view we can't use the excuse that we always were and we always be the same wild beasts, we can push against this, educate people, and shame the racists,nationalists and extremists.
    - WJW 5y ago
      You are already defining new tribes of "us reasonable people" versus the racists, nationalists and extremists though, unintentionally showing how hard it is to ignore the human tendency to divide people into groups.
      - 5y ago
teekert 5y ago
Please read “Human Kind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman. Excellent book that may cure your negative view of your fellow humans. I for one get motivated by collaboration.
smhost 5y ago
There are a couple problems with your line of reasoning. 1) Even if it's true that humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other, this doesn't put any constraints on what the nature of the competition could be. There are constructive forms of competition, and there are destructive forms. There are useless forms and productive forms. So if it really is purely about competition, there's no reason why societies can't put constraints on what kinds of competition are acceptable. 2) There are unified institutions that internally have high competition. In fact, that's more of a rule than an exception. E.g., every professional sports organization, every company with competitive incentive structure, etc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- admissionsguy 5y ago
  > Even if it's true that humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other, this doesn't put any constraints on what the nature of the competition could be. I would say the competition is necessarily unconstrained. Even full-scale nuclear war is on the table in the service of one-upping one another. You could say I'm conflating competing with survival and other values, but that would be incorrect since the whole international tension has competition for various things at its source. To structure the world differently would require lots and lots of tyranny. Empires to that, and may achieve great things, at a cost. > 2) There are unified institutions that internally have high competition. In fact, that's more of a rule than an exception. E.g., every professional sports organization, every company with competitive incentive structure, etc. Or the Communist Party of China. To have United Earth government fashioned in the like of FIFA, Amazon, or USA Gymnastics is as dystopian as it gets.
  - simion314 5y ago
    I will disagree, my village is not competing with the neighboring village, we are not making plans how to fuck them over, there is no zero sum game. Then I personally I do not see a competition with our neighboring countries (I am from Romania), there might be some bad history but only idiots will bring this up, so I can say that from my point of view we are not trying to screw with our neighbors or the reverse. Now if I try to go up a level we get the EU and this is where politics shoves it's ugly head, there are people that are not happy and some politicians that just want to blame the incompetence of their 8+ years reign to others .... but do a major number of regular citizens want to screw over the other group ? do they wish bad things for the other EU members ? I don't think so, people are selfish and want the best for their own but I don't think they actually want bad things to the others, for sure nobody sane wants a conflict. Sorry but my opinion is if you want a war you are not sane(I know at least one dude here wants for a war to start with Russia, we need to find a way to keep this insane people in check)

rbanffy 5y ago

As anyone who works with open source software can tell you, cooperation beats competition in the long run. Or, as the old saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”

admissionsguy 5y ago
> cooperation beats competition It would. A civilisation of intelligent ants would be unstoppable. But there is (currently) no way to make monkey-people cooperate at scale.
hnbad 5y ago
Cooperation is literally why we are humans. Individualism doesn't require the complex brains we have. Our brains are this complex because we evolved as a highly social species. We didn't hunt the megafauna as individual superwarriors, we hunted them as a group. If prehistoric megafauna was shown a zombie movie, it would recognize us as the zombies: there's too many of us and we never tire. They tried to sprint away but we jogged after them, hurling a dozen spears at them like death from a thousand paper cuts. Yes, we value excellence, but only because it brings us forward as a group. The goal of competing for being the best isn't to find out who's best but to encourage us all to be better.
- admissionsguy 5y ago
  > Cooperation is literally why we are humans. Cooperation within the tribe. (Often violent) competition against the others. And the evolution of human intelligence was driven largely by the need to deceive, out-compete and achieve domination over others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligenc...
  - hnbad 5y ago
    Yes, tribal rivalries and fragmentation escalate when resources become scarce. Luckily we've solved that problem: housing, food and even luxury goods exist in abundance. It's important to keep in mind that even the "alpha wolf" phenomenon was only observed in captivity, while wolf packs roaming freely had a much more egalitarian dynamic. The reason we see ruthless competition everywhere is not that humans are naturally antagonistic, it's that we've created a superstructure that perpetually creates artificial scarcity and "hacks" our stress response. We know that this is true in the small: "limited offers", countdowns and "exclusive deals" are widely understood cheap marketing gimmicks. We even came up with a catchy acronym for this: FOMO, emphasis on "fear". We're less ready to acknowledge this exists in the large. We've become so accustomed to the so-called Great Man Theory and a Capitalist Realism lens of history that we struggle to even imagine a different version of prehistory than the violent struggle for survival we proposed under colonialism to justify our subjugation of the "savages" _for their own good_.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      > that we've created a superstructure that perpetually creates artificial scarcity and "hacks" our stress response. Capitalism extracts work from material scarcity gradients the same way a Stirling engine extracts it from temperature gradients.
rop10 5y ago
There are competing projects (gcc, clang) and there is competition within individual projects. If competition ceases or is discouraged, projects often morph into mindless corporate sponsored churn and unoriginal rewrites.
- simion314 5y ago
  >If competition ceases or is discouraged, projects often morph into mindless corporate sponsored churn and unoriginal rewrites. Not true, this is some recent thing. KDE goes strong with few corporate support, the issue would be if some other projects gets unfair advantages so you get something with worse architecture and quality more popular. And with open source you do not see 10 kernels competing, you have a few and all the other kernels are toys or experiments. Why did US and Russia and the other worked together on the ISS? are they insane? would make more sense that each country creates it's own rocket, it's own space station , it's own telescopes and not collaborate ? Could be cases where cooperation can solve something and competition would be incapable of solving or would solve it but with much more costs (maybe human lives)?

simion314 5y ago

>monkey brain That is the issue, we need to kick down the "monkey brain" leaders. We need better education, we need better collaboration. Tribalism is stupid and wrong. I lve in a village, as an child I was told a lot of idiotic things like"people from X are Y..." and when I left for university and meet people from X I seen that they are not different then us, and I seen people from my region acting like idiots making me feel shame. Monkey brain is a problem, as a politician, CEO or sociophat you can exploit it on your advantage but as the whole humanity we need to admit is bad, is history and we are not wild beasts anymore, we need to have better expectation for ourselves.

WJW 5y ago
> That is the issue, we need to kick down the "monkey brain" leaders. I think you completely misunderstand the post you are replying to. It's not just the leaders, it is everyone. Even me, even you. There are heaps and heaps of research papers showing that this affects every single human and that the more you think you are immune from it, the bigger its impact on you.
- simion314 5y ago
  I understand that, but humanity changed, like most of us now understand that race or nationality is irrelevant and you can't rank them. This is progress. Most of us understand that we can ignore religious differences and that is idiotic to kill the others because their religion differs in less then 1%, so from my point of view we can't use the excuse that we always were and we always be the same wild beasts, we can push against this, educate people, and shame the racists,nationalists and extremists.
  - WJW 5y ago
    You are already defining new tribes of "us reasonable people" versus the racists, nationalists and extremists though, unintentionally showing how hard it is to ignore the human tendency to divide people into groups.
    - 5y ago

teekert 5y ago

Please read “Human Kind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman. Excellent book that may cure your negative view of your fellow humans. I for one get motivated by collaboration.

smhost 5y ago

There are a couple problems with your line of reasoning. 1) Even if it's true that humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other, this doesn't put any constraints on what the nature of the competition could be. There are constructive forms of competition, and there are destructive forms. There are useless forms and productive forms. So if it really is purely about competition, there's no reason why societies can't put constraints on what kinds of competition are acceptable. 2) There are unified institutions that internally have high competition. In fact, that's more of a rule than an exception. E.g., every professional sports organization, every company with competitive incentive structure, etc.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
admissionsguy 5y ago
> Even if it's true that humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other, this doesn't put any constraints on what the nature of the competition could be. I would say the competition is necessarily unconstrained. Even full-scale nuclear war is on the table in the service of one-upping one another. You could say I'm conflating competing with survival and other values, but that would be incorrect since the whole international tension has competition for various things at its source. To structure the world differently would require lots and lots of tyranny. Empires to that, and may achieve great things, at a cost. > 2) There are unified institutions that internally have high competition. In fact, that's more of a rule than an exception. E.g., every professional sports organization, every company with competitive incentive structure, etc. Or the Communist Party of China. To have United Earth government fashioned in the like of FIFA, Amazon, or USA Gymnastics is as dystopian as it gets.
- simion314 5y ago
  I will disagree, my village is not competing with the neighboring village, we are not making plans how to fuck them over, there is no zero sum game. Then I personally I do not see a competition with our neighboring countries (I am from Romania), there might be some bad history but only idiots will bring this up, so I can say that from my point of view we are not trying to screw with our neighbors or the reverse. Now if I try to go up a level we get the EU and this is where politics shoves it's ugly head, there are people that are not happy and some politicians that just want to blame the incompetence of their 8+ years reign to others .... but do a major number of regular citizens want to screw over the other group ? do they wish bad things for the other EU members ? I don't think so, people are selfish and want the best for their own but I don't think they actually want bad things to the others, for sure nobody sane wants a conflict. Sorry but my opinion is if you want a war you are not sane(I know at least one dude here wants for a war to start with Russia, we need to find a way to keep this insane people in check)