Competition and cooperation [as] opposites, with vice on one side and virtue on the other … is a false dichotomy … The market-based competition envisioned in economics is disciplined by rules and reputations. … Just as competition is not a shorthand for “anything goes,” the quick and thoughtless inference that cooperation is necessarily virtuous is often unjustified. In many cases, cooperation is a tool for an in-group to take advantage of those outside the group. …
And if there are structures with management, there is necessarily cooperation? The underlings who obey the managers (regardless of their motives for doing so) are "cooperating" in achieving the managers' ends?
Side definitional question: it is obvious that government officials manage the people; but, in a democracy, do the voters "manage" the elected officials?
Though you begin by contrasting competition with cooperation, you talk mainly about the contrast with management. Cooperation and management are not the same. In the small hunter-gatherer band, the (diffuse, informal) political authority arises directly from the intent of the members of the band to cooperate with each other. But in the modern world “cooperation” with the political authority--in other words, obedience--is largely non-voluntary, not intentionally cooperative. And, of course, much cooperation is outside the context of government, or of management; for example, trade is cooperative.
By the way, while in monotheistic religion there is no competition at the highest level, Manichean and polytheistic religions have competition.
I know you're thinking lots about a future clash with grabby aliens, but I suspect that ordinary human-vs-human total war can also suddenly highlight the value of competition in our society. Middle-class Americans are living in a time of such safety that even microagressions seem chilling to them. If there are wars, they are handled by someone else and have no bearing on our lives. On the other hand, if an enemy army were advancing on our town Barbarossa style, I think we'd suddenly become far less scrupulous in our compliance with all the occupational licenses, diversity quotas and procurement rules. Maybe there is a cycle in which management overreach naturally ratchets up, but then the ratchet slips when unrestrained competition becomes necessary, when we just need to mobilize and win. That might even be testable. The lack of recent ratchet-back events might be the start of an explanation for why we are tied up by overmanagement. The COVID crisis was clearly not enough of a jolt.
Management is coordination to make decisions. Hierarchies only do that indirectly, by deferring to decisions made by the "top dog". There is of course competition for positions in hierarchies. So hierarchies have elements of both, as do most human institutions.
How do you see Great Ape (such as ours) social hierarchies, a form of competition, cooperation or management or all three? Should we be boosting our hierarchical psychology or deconstructing it? Eugenecists ironically lacked insight into theirs; in that sense, rather than being too evolutionary as the god cults and marx cults ("we ceased to be apes") would have it, they weren't enough so.
I don't at all mean the term "competition" to imply conscious awareness. Biological natural selection is a standard case, and almost none that it applies to are aware of it.
A profound and illuminating post. My minor remark:
You write that “bands competed to make more descendants . . . .” But this was generally not a conscious objective, even for individuals, let alone for the band as a whole. The term ‘competition’, like the terms ‘objective’, ‘goal’, ‘purpose’, etc., suggests something antecedently present to consciousness, an Aristotelian “final cause.” *Maximizing the number of one’s descendants*--even for an individual, let alone for a group—is only a sort of unconscious quasi-objective: the individual or group behaves (somewhat) as if this were his/its goal, but is not (fully) aware of it as such.
I'm skeptical about travel, or even communications, on galactic-distance scales, even given millions of years of civilizations. I think technological societies are rare and sparse. Dolphins and elephants are intelligent and have been around for millions of years, yet they have made ~zero technological progress. So even on Earth we are rare. I suspect that's typical of intelligent life! And any other (very rare) civilizations like ours, or more advanced than ours, are simply (for now) too far away for us to notice. I say look for signals, not UFOs. We'll detect signals long, long before we see alien spaceships.
The relevant finite versions are aliens within a billion lightyears, and able to travel between stars after controlling an entire star system for ten million years. Still skeptical about those versions?
You listed "our AIs could make peace via “acausal trades” with their AIs" as a "quite implausible assumption." Do you mind clarifying? Acausal trade is just ordinary trade except through the lens of a particular class of decision theories. And as I'm sure you're aware, gains from trade do not rely on an assumption that agents are embedded within a regime of managed competition.
Among your list of "quite implausible" assumptions (to which you object, due to their implausibility) are: "that a) no aliens whatsoever exist anywhere," and "b) interstellar travel is completely impossible." And I agree that both of those are "quite implausible." But now, simply replace those with "a) any advanced aliens are extremely far away," and "b) interstellar travel is extremely difficult," and suddenly I find these not only to be plausible, but also extremely likely! Hmm.
And if there are structures with management, there is necessarily cooperation? The underlings who obey the managers (regardless of their motives for doing so) are "cooperating" in achieving the managers' ends?
Side definitional question: it is obvious that government officials manage the people; but, in a democracy, do the voters "manage" the elected officials?
Except in the very smallest groups, we cannot cooperate without creating structures and people that manage.
Though you begin by contrasting competition with cooperation, you talk mainly about the contrast with management. Cooperation and management are not the same. In the small hunter-gatherer band, the (diffuse, informal) political authority arises directly from the intent of the members of the band to cooperate with each other. But in the modern world “cooperation” with the political authority--in other words, obedience--is largely non-voluntary, not intentionally cooperative. And, of course, much cooperation is outside the context of government, or of management; for example, trade is cooperative.
By the way, while in monotheistic religion there is no competition at the highest level, Manichean and polytheistic religions have competition.
Yes of course real big war would move most people toward valuing competition, unless they thought world government was a feasible option.
I know you're thinking lots about a future clash with grabby aliens, but I suspect that ordinary human-vs-human total war can also suddenly highlight the value of competition in our society. Middle-class Americans are living in a time of such safety that even microagressions seem chilling to them. If there are wars, they are handled by someone else and have no bearing on our lives. On the other hand, if an enemy army were advancing on our town Barbarossa style, I think we'd suddenly become far less scrupulous in our compliance with all the occupational licenses, diversity quotas and procurement rules. Maybe there is a cycle in which management overreach naturally ratchets up, but then the ratchet slips when unrestrained competition becomes necessary, when we just need to mobilize and win. That might even be testable. The lack of recent ratchet-back events might be the start of an explanation for why we are tied up by overmanagement. The COVID crisis was clearly not enough of a jolt.
Management is coordination to make decisions. Hierarchies only do that indirectly, by deferring to decisions made by the "top dog". There is of course competition for positions in hierarchies. So hierarchies have elements of both, as do most human institutions.
How do you see Great Ape (such as ours) social hierarchies, a form of competition, cooperation or management or all three? Should we be boosting our hierarchical psychology or deconstructing it? Eugenecists ironically lacked insight into theirs; in that sense, rather than being too evolutionary as the god cults and marx cults ("we ceased to be apes") would have it, they weren't enough so.
I don't at all mean the term "competition" to imply conscious awareness. Biological natural selection is a standard case, and almost none that it applies to are aware of it.
A profound and illuminating post. My minor remark:
You write that “bands competed to make more descendants . . . .” But this was generally not a conscious objective, even for individuals, let alone for the band as a whole. The term ‘competition’, like the terms ‘objective’, ‘goal’, ‘purpose’, etc., suggests something antecedently present to consciousness, an Aristotelian “final cause.” *Maximizing the number of one’s descendants*--even for an individual, let alone for a group—is only a sort of unconscious quasi-objective: the individual or group behaves (somewhat) as if this were his/its goal, but is not (fully) aware of it as such.
If they can travel just a few lightyears, colonize, then repeat, they can expand over very large distances that way.
I'm skeptical about travel, or even communications, on galactic-distance scales, even given millions of years of civilizations. I think technological societies are rare and sparse. Dolphins and elephants are intelligent and have been around for millions of years, yet they have made ~zero technological progress. So even on Earth we are rare. I suspect that's typical of intelligent life! And any other (very rare) civilizations like ours, or more advanced than ours, are simply (for now) too far away for us to notice. I say look for signals, not UFOs. We'll detect signals long, long before we see alien spaceships.
The relevant finite versions are aliens within a billion lightyears, and able to travel between stars after controlling an entire star system for ten million years. Still skeptical about those versions?
I'm skeptical that we can usefully trade with possibly hostile aliens using such decision theories.
You listed "our AIs could make peace via “acausal trades” with their AIs" as a "quite implausible assumption." Do you mind clarifying? Acausal trade is just ordinary trade except through the lens of a particular class of decision theories. And as I'm sure you're aware, gains from trade do not rely on an assumption that agents are embedded within a regime of managed competition.
Among your list of "quite implausible" assumptions (to which you object, due to their implausibility) are: "that a) no aliens whatsoever exist anywhere," and "b) interstellar travel is completely impossible." And I agree that both of those are "quite implausible." But now, simply replace those with "a) any advanced aliens are extremely far away," and "b) interstellar travel is extremely difficult," and suddenly I find these not only to be plausible, but also extremely likely! Hmm.
Yes, and of aliens if they did so.