Conservatives are perfectly capable of understanding positive-sum games when they expect the privileged in-group to be the benefactor. What is a labor contract, if not a positive-sum game where the corporation sucks up all the positive gain?
Game theory as a cental tenet of the human condition is a liberal concept, which conservatives will happily discard if it doesn’t suit them. Conservatives may cloak their disapproval in the guise of liberal concerns so that they’re in a stronger debate position in liberal-dominated social circles, but what they’re really upset by is the negation of the conservative world order - a strict hierarchy with narcissistic men at the top of clearly delineated nations, struggling for dominance through pettiness and violence.
They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.
They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.
I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.
The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.
The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.
I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.
It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/
Conservatives are perfectly capable of understanding positive-sum games when they expect the privileged in-group to be the benefactor. What is a labor contract, if not a positive-sum game where the corporation sucks up all the positive gain?
Game theory as a cental tenet of the human condition is a liberal concept, which conservatives will happily discard if it doesn’t suit them. Conservatives may cloak their disapproval in the guise of liberal concerns so that they’re in a stronger debate position in liberal-dominated social circles, but what they’re really upset by is the negation of the conservative world order - a strict hierarchy with narcissistic men at the top of clearly delineated nations, struggling for dominance through pettiness and violence.
They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.
I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.
The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.
The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.
I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.
It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/
See it’s descriptions like that that make me think conservative ideology is actually a mental health issue, not a political one.