[extropy-chat] All hail Will Wilkinson

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On 1/4/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> An arms race for tallness of genetically engineered babies (yeah, right)
> may end up with negative side effects, such as poor health.
>
> Nothing in the imprecise real world is *exactly* zero-sum, and if it
> were, an altruist wouldn't care about it one way or the other.  Some
> zero-sum games are actually negative-sum games because of wasted effort,
> wasted time, wasted money, infliction of fear and emotional distress.
> Other zero-sum games are positive-sum because people have fun playing
> them and learn something.  It's the "zero-sum" games that are actually
> negative which Bostrom, and myself, would revile.

### No contest here, although in the imprecise popular usage a
"zero-sum game" stands for something to be reviled.

The usefulness of Will's article (and a few other posts you can find
on his blog) is in pointing out that some of the canonical examples of
"zero-sum games", such as status seeking,  are actually positive-sum
games. Nick, as far as I remember, believes that status seeking is a
negative-sum game, and AFAIK was quite seriously asking to enact
limitations in e.g. genetic engineering of height that you mentioned.

Rafal