Do you see the world as a contest with winners and losers? Do you classify everyone as either “allies” or “opponents”? If so, congratulations! This essay is for you.
In a perfectly zero-sum world, winning and losing are symmetrical. If someone scores a point, it means someone else will lose a point. Passing a car on the highway puts you ahead, and being passed puts you behind. Making a profit on a stock trade means that someone else, somewhere, lost the same amount of money on the other side of the same trade. Hurting your opponent is the same as helping yourself.
Sport championships are typically zero-sum competitions. In most sports, a team’s standing is really a question of rearranging the names at the top of the league. In order for one team to move into first place and win the huge prize, the other teams must move downward by an equal and opposite amount. To see team A advancing over team B is the same as having team B fall behind team A.
The same is largely true of elections. Elections are often a zero-sum game with winners and losers. In a two-party system, the seats lost by one party are exactly equal and opposite to those won by the other party. The American press covers politics the same way it covers sports: as if it were a zero-sum game.
The strategy for zero sum contests is super easy to understand. It’s easy for us to believe in, and it’s easy to persuade others to adopt it. We learn it because some familiar experiences are zero sum contests, and we grow up with them.
Sometimes losing and gaining are not symmetrical. Burning down a house is easy, but building a house is much harder. Feeding yourself takes work and effort. The skills needed to feed yourself are quite different than the skills needed to ruin someone else’s food.
Many in politics have noted that negative ads are both cheaper and more effective than positive ads. Anger and fear tends to reliably turn out more voters than satisfaction.
In a zero-sum world, finding a meal means your opponent will go hungry, and vice-versa. Logically speaking, advancing at the expense of others is a perfectly sound strategy.
If you find that helping yourself is difficult or expensive, and hurting others is easy and cheap, the path to success is clear.
In a world where results have asymmetrical costs, but zero-sum results, it makes more logical sense to burn down your neighbor’s house than to build yourself a better one. Perhaps you can find a way to spoil your opponent’s meal, causing them to go hungry.
That strategy of course has an obvious flaw. In the real world, once the costs are asymmetrical, the results are no longer zero-sum. Hurting others doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get any food yourself, or get a nice new house.
It’s possible for both competitors to end up as losers. The lose-lose outcome is fairly inexpensive to execute and easy to achieve. It turns out to be a terrible idea to apply a lopsided strategy in situations which are not fully zero-sum, but we do it anyway.
Contests are everywhere. We rely on AI algorithms to classify and recommend decisions to us. These algorithms in turn present us with the winners and losers of the contests they run.
When we consider any contest, we should ask whether it is truly zero-sum. Are we falling for the trap that in order to win, someone else must lose? Do we encourage attacks on our “enemies,” and celebrate their humiliation and failure? Do we think that the more they lose, that somehow their losses will result in us getting what we want?
Thank goodness most of us prefer to build houses rather than to burn them, because the real world is not a zero-sum contest.
But if we rely on systems that have the zero-sum presumption baked in, we may surround ourselves with systems that, left unsupervised, prefer burning houses to building them.