🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)

Imagine if no one treated life as a zero-sum game and only agreed to play in co-op mode?

In any other game, if you found out it was rigged after playing your hardest for years, and folx were like "that's just how it is, and the price of losing can include dying in a gutter from sheer indifference", you'd probably flip the fucking table.

Feb 5 at 2:06amWeb
Show threadJuniper, hinge shortageFeb 5
@alice so many people are concerned about fairness in the sense of not letting someone else get more than they "deserve" that they don't look at fairness in the sense of ensuring that everybody has enough.
Show threadJacquelineFeb 5

@eruonna @alice

Except for billionaires. Billionaires all deserve their yachts, their teenage sex slaves, etc

Show threadJackMexFeb 5

@burnoutqueen @eruonna @alice

And a kick on the balls.

Show threadPiperFeb 5
@eruonna The idea that basic food and shelter are things that people can "not deserve" is deeply troubling to me.
Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsFeb 5

@eruonna @alice

George Lakoff, Moral Politics.

Show threadgkrnoursFeb 5

@alice @eruonna yes, that.

if we give a hundred bucks to everyone everymonth, that's life changing to the many people living paycheck to paycheck or being jobless while billionaire wouldn't notice it.

if the same hundred bucks was mean tested, it would be more expensive because of the need to mean test, many people who are within the criteria wouldn't get it and billionaire would still not notice it.

well landlord would notice but the jack the price up regardless anyway

Show threadMatilda LoveFeb 5
@alice can confirm i am flipping some fucking tables
Show threadSeán FenianFeb 5
@alice ABSO FREAKING LUTELY

And the same for relationships.
Show threadFlipper 🐬🏳️‍🌈Feb 5
@alice my relationship with my dad would've been better, for one.
Show threadDaniël Franke Feb 5

@alice Sadly more people played in co-op mode* a few decades ago, but neoliberalism has made us think that everything is PvP these days.

* As long as you had the right colour, procreation equipment, attraction behaviour, and acted like you were expected based on the aforementioned properties. Things were definitely not perfect, but it would be nice if we got the societal cohesion back without all the othering bullshit behaviour.

Show threadThe Orange ThemeFeb 5
@alice We could have Star Trek future tomorrow if we took care of the worst billionaire trash in society and then worked together to build a better tomorrow. I guarantee it.
Show thread🌻 Welcome Back 🌻Feb 5

@alice
The original Monopoly game came with 2 sets of rules. The one we play that encourages monopolies (and flipping of the table) and the other that taught anti-monopoly ideals and cooperation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)

Monopoly (game) - Wikipedia

Show threadMillyFeb 5
@alice And people still play monopoly, even though it's litterally designed to be bad, for educational purposes.
Show threadGraham CFeb 5
@alice one of the most interesting things about evolution is how cheating occurs in social species. The bigger a group, the better the odds that you won't get caught. The fewer individuals cheating, the greater the benefit to a cheat. In small units like what our ancestors evolved in, it was harder to not get caught. In our society, the cheats took over and made it so even if they get caught they don't get consequences. If we were wasps we would have eaten their heads by now.
Show threadAmorpheusFeb 5

@alice There is a nice and
playful mathematical formalization of your proposal.

https://ncase.me/trust/

Can anyone identify the point of failure in reality?

The Evolution of Trust

an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

Show threadKotesFeb 5
@alice Your post is quite thought-provoking, but real-world capitalism is a mix of zero-sum and cooperative game elements, making it difficult to easily separate the two.

Perhaps it's precisely because no one believes it's a purely cooperative game that so many people are willing to abandon those who have "lost."
Show threadCuriousFeb 5
@alice ah but co-op is the cheat code, collaboration, collective action and compassion also work.
Its the noobs stuck in small minded competitive. And it shows.
Show thread🌸 VårgubbenFeb 5

@alice IIRC viewing life as a zero-sum game, where the gains of one can only be accomplished at the expense of another, and thinking this is the proper way to go about things, correlates strongly with a below average IQ.

I’d probably have to dig a bit to find the source again (if it’s even possible on the post-searchable web) though.

Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Feb 6
@alice The first exercise assigned in a Negotiations class I took was to hold hands with a partner with our elbows to the desk, for everyone to be awarded one point for each time the back of their partner's hand touched the desk. Most pairs immediately started arm wrestling, but it turned out we had let our assumptions override the actual instructions: The partners could have cooperated to take turns letting each other push their hands down to the desk, meaning the few team members who cooperated to touch the desk as much as possible scored the most points while the arm-wrestlers lost out. It was a perception-expander that changed our idea of what a negotiation could be, and really it's applicable to life in general.
Show threadIrene ZhangFeb 6
@ljwrites @alice wait is this a common exercise? Because I have a friend that also did this in his negotiation class and his partner broke his arm.
Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Feb 6
@irene @alice It probably is because my instructors must have gotten it from somewhere and also the WHAT
Show threadDan PortsFeb 6
@ljwrites @irene @alice I also am just now discovering what the point of this exercise was supposed to be, because our friend had to be taken to the hospital and thus missed the big reveal about cooperation
Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Feb 6
@dan @irene @alice Oh no, the instructor could have told you the next class at least 🤣 but I guess the situation was maybe a bit too serious. That's the worst thing I heard happen in a negotiation class since an incident where our instructors taught a course to Samsung employees and HR decided to fire a woman who they deemed too aggressive and uncooperative in the exercises. The instructors managed to beg them to reverse course, but shit these classes can be high-stakes huh
Show threadDan PortsFeb 6

@irene @ljwrites @alice lol, just to be clear, this is the same person I just posted about, it is not like there is an epidemic of people breaking their arms in negotiation class.

Well, maybe there is.

I subsequently learned that this is a pretty common injury for professional arm wrestlers (something I also subsequently learned exists)

Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Feb 6
@dan @irene @alice Thank goodness for small mercies but also holy shit
Show threadDan PortsFeb 6

@ljwrites @alice Oh, hey, my grad school officemate took a negotiation class where they did presumably the same exercise (though I don't remember it being described quite that way -- possibly they were specifically told to arm-wrestle? Or possibly they just assumed.)

Anyway, he started arm-wrestling with his partner and then...

...SNAP. Suddenly his arm was dangling from a point in the middle where arms are not supposed to bend.

Yup, he had completely shattered his humerus.

I guess he learned the lesson about cooperation vs competition the hardest possible way.

Show thread@[email protected] has movedFeb 6
@ljwrites @alice I suggest get two old desks at a dumpster, stand them vertically on top of the desk so that they touch the backs of the hands with a 1 mm gap, then vibrate the hands.
Show threadTomKrajci 🇺🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️Feb 6

@ljwrites @alice @astronot

This sounds like the prisoner's dilemma, but some folks are starting with different assumptions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

"The prisoner's dilemma is a game theory thought experiment involving two *rational* agents...."

Bazinga!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM

Prisoner's dilemma - Wikipedia