Word: zeros
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What Schelling's point suggests is that the very existence of communication--among cells via hormones, among ants via pheromones, among people via words--is owing to the non-zero-sumness that pervades life. Evolution created pheromones and other information technologies because they let players of various kinds cooperate...
...risk of sounding species-centric, I think words are cooler than pheromones. Words lent vital impetus to a whole new kind of evolution, a cultural evolution through which politics and religion and technology develop. Note how much of the evolving technology, in particular, is an infrastructure for non-zero-sum games--from the Silk Road, which eased mutually profitable exchange, to the Internet, which lets you play more games with more people than ever before. Meanwhile, social complexity has grown, just as organic complexity grew via biological evolution...
Relations among nations have long been getting more non-zero-sum. The fates of national economies are more and more shared--win-win or lose-lose. And nuclear weapons have made war a highly non-zero-sum game, a lose-lose game that you win by not playing...
...United Nations and other such bodies into a genuine system of world governance. That's not a crazy thought, assuming technological evolution keeps following the path that biological evolution embarked on a few billion years ago--giving rise to larger and more elaborate and more far-flung non-zero-sum games featuring more and more players...
...zero-sumness is a kind of potential, a potential for mutually bad outcomes or mutually good outcomes. And it is self-regenerating. The more of it you turn into win-win outcomes, the more new games are created. We are on the cusp of this planet's 4 billion-year-old expansion of non-zero-sumness. We decide whether it will keep growing and how smoothly it will grow. Kind of makes us seem important, doesn...