Non-zero-sum James

Karma: 113

Strong believer in effective altruism and have taken the giving pledge. My weekly blog at nonzerosum.games is a world-help site of sorts—focussing on win-win games as essential to facing global issues. I explore game-theoretical approaches to real world issues in an accessible way, using illustrations, simulations and badly drawn graphs.

I’m a Documentary filmmaker who has spent over 20 years researching, interviewing and building stories around the world—everything from the war in Afghanistan, to life in inner-city Los Angeles, to an Aussie bloke with 34 dogs. I’m a life long student, with passion for creating a better world.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 28, 2025, 8:58 PM
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in reply to: nathan98000’s comment on: Inescapably Value-Laden Experience—Can We Make Morality Rationalisable?
I’m not understanding the distinction you’re making between the “experience” and the “response.” In my example, there is a needle poking someone’s arm. Someone can experience that in different ways (including feeling more or less pain depending on one’s mindset). That experience is not distinct from a response, it just is a response.
Now you appear to be using a definition of “response” that is synonymous with “experience”. Before you were using “experience” to describe “freaking out” which I would see as a “response” to an “experience” (an action you take after having experienced something). If this is a semantic issue, I don’t need you to subscribe to my definitions, just know these are the definitions I’m using, and hopefully my meaning is clear.
However, in the links I included in my previous comment, I suggested there are people who explicitly reject the view that this is all that matters
I find these explicit rejections unconvincing. People often self-report inaccurately. The tendency to value beauty, for instance, is quite easily reducible to pleasure-seeking. We have biologically induced feelings of pleasure that are associated with beauty, that correlate with evolutionary advantages.
I have challenged you to genuinely try this with a moral tenet you and I would agree on. If you are genuinely interested in trying to understand my point, I think this is the best way for you to understand it.
And again, assuming the experience of pain is inescapable, why does it follow that it is necessarily bad?
The inescapable nature of the experience is not what makes it good or bad, otherwise I would have called it “Inescapable experience” and not stipulated “value-laden”. A neutral value like the click of a finger is still inescapably value-laden, it’s just the value is neutral (zero), and therefore not really relevant when extending into a moral discussion.
I believe I have already provided arguments to support the two questions you’ve asked, but in short:
1. It is definitionally bad—if pain and suffering was a good experience we would call it pleasure. I think your confusion might be to do with a sense that a “moral” good is necessarily something that is imposed on a person or action, I disagree with this directionality. My point is that “moral” goods are emergent extrapolations derived from inherently good or bad experiences.
2. This is the foundational claim of the theory, it cannot be proved, but it can be falsified. I’m saying this is a worthwhile framework of understanding that I believe is consistent with reality, and as such might actually be real. But like with any theory, this can only be provisionally verified by numerous examples of where it is consistent, and if it is inconsistent it should be able to be showed to be so.
I’m not asking you to falsify it, you are welcome to try if you want. I would prefer you took the challenge I’ve provided, as this will actually help you understand the proposition. I am offering an explanation and a framework that I think has high utility. Whether you adopt it or not is up to you. You don’t have to falsify it to reject it.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 28, 2025, 5:56 PM
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on: Cause neutrality doesn’t mean all EA causes matter equally
I can see how encouraging this sort of “cause neutrality” might keep people cognisant of particular programs in a given field that is not, in general, highly ranked for effectiveness where nevertheless that particular program is very effective, perhaps?
I haven’t actually observed this issue, the project of EA seems all about beginning neutral and ending up with a hierarchy—if it is swerving away from this approach then that seems antithetical to the general mission.
On a personal note, I generally try to direct my giving towards the least emotive topics (general funds for boring diseases), assuming that there will be an over-supply for more emotive areas.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 10:20 PM
18 points
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on: Kurzgesagt video on factory farming
One of the issues that negates growth in the ethical meat market is that it is essentially competing on two fronts. On one front you have people who don’t consider the ethics of what they’re eating, and on the other end you have people that care so much about animals that they don’t eat animals at all.
This means that the market for ethical meat exists in a narrow band between these two groups, and may always struggle to reach critical mass. If, for instance, the ethical market is 10% but 5% of people are vegan, that’s half your ethical market gone, meaning you lose many economies of scale, and also you lose an opportunity to grow, because the more concerned people become about animal welfare the more people will also become vegan or vegetarian, in one door, out the other. I’m not suggesting of course that vegans should eat meat in order to bolster the market, just that it’s a tricky issue for this reason.
I think the video does a good job of trying to broaden that narrow band, by focusing on animal welfare rather than the body-count of animals. This might be a good approach. I can almost imagine a world where everyone is vegan, but I can much more easily imagine a world where 10% of people are vegan, but where 100% of the meat is ethically grown, which would be an immeasurably better situation than the one we have at present (until of course we consider the environmental impacts). So, although it’s a tricky issue, it’s worth pursuing.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 9:35 PM
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on: The Reality of Holding an Ava Summit in Los Angeles: Is it really necessary?
Agreed, creating this sort of selection pressure against foundations less able or less willing to fork out for expensive conferences is likely to bias the conclusions of summit (potentially in exactly the wrong direction)—this gets exacerbated if scholarships are snapped up by unscrupulous organisations.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 9:30 PM
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on: Reputation Hardening: GiveWell
It is news to me that this isn’t already the case, seems like an obvious positive, both for the potentially higher ratings (not being down-adjusted) and as instructive for the organisations themselves.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 8:22 PM
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on: On Suicide
This is a beautiful piece of writing, thanks for telling your story and the work you do. I’m reminded of a quote by ZeFrank:
The thoughts that I have in my head that make me feel the most lonely, because I don’t think that anyone else thinks them, are also the thoughts that have the most potential to make me feel connected.
I think this line is especially important:
Speaking as a trained crisis counselor, people on those lines absolutely want to talk to you. You are not a burden.
It must be difficult given the narrow perspective you outline to realise this, but I think it’s really important to understand—not all others are merely transactional, human connection has a value of its own.

Again, lovely, important piece.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 6:25 PM
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on: Utilitarianism.net Updates Again
Thanks for this, a hadn’t discovered this yet, what great resource (and thorough).

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 6:08 PM
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in reply to: nathan98000’s comment on: Should we try harder to appeal to conservatives?
There is probably a self-selection pressure against conservatives in that generally conservatives support individual freedoms over collective cooperation, and all of these projects seem to require some sacrifice of individual freedoms in service of collective goals.
This is just a reality of dealing with long term issues, thinking collectively becomes a priority.

But I agree that actual outreach to conservatives is worthwhile, to avoid an echo chamber—and there may be conservative solutions that have not been fairly considered, after all individual freedoms are a good in themselves and can lead to unexpected benefits collectively too (like the free market in many respects).

I see this as somewhat of an uphill battle though, as I expect self-selection to be the main obstacle for conservatives who might be put off by collectivism, and feel they are already doing their part by contributing to their church. In saying this, I guess the solution would be to acknowledge these realities when designing outreach messaging.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 5:54 PM
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in reply to: nathan98000’s comment on: Inescapably Value-Laden Experience—Can We Make Morality Rationalisable?
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for your comment. I think you’re conflating “experience” with “response”, I’m speaking specifically about the experience. My daughter, for instance, gets immunotherapy every month, 3 injections, her response to her experience of these injections is pretty chill, and no doubt her actual pain tolerance has increased in a more mechanical way than just her learned behaviour, but she still experiences pain, she is always a little nervous how much each will hurt—she doesn’t get to choose in advance the goodness or badness of the experience, it’s a matter of luck (she can of course choose, or train herself not to react in a way that makes the experience worse, by not tensing her muscle or flinching).
On the other hand, paying attention to a click of the fingers involves no inescapable pain or pleasure, so your sense that it has no inherent moral quality is consistent with my position. The only moral value I can see is if that you’ve potentially stopped the person doing what they would have preferred to continue doing (perhaps concentrating on book or a video game, or sleeping) which might inescapably bring them some small amount of suffering—their reaction is in part up to them (in part automatic) and is only morally relevant in that it might indicate whether you caused them suffering or not.
The same conflation between “experience” and “response” might apply your claim about hedonism. I also see hedonism as a response to the world, a behaviour connoting the short-term, selfish, simplistic pursuit of pleasure. For instance, given this conversation and our previous conversations, a pursuit of pleasure might lead me to avoid this conversation (jk), but actually that would be entirely unsatisfying and feel like an unfinished project. I also think in the long run, I believe that nailing down a moral foundation that is transferrable between humans of different backgrounds is worthwhile pursuit, which, if successful, will help spread greater well-being (in terms derivable from IVLEs). Addressing questions about my position helps me understand it better and equips me for conversations in the future, making the time spent on this response valuable to me. I happen to be a person with plenty of pleasure and happiness in my life, I get greater pleasure now by helping others and thinking about ways to help understand and spread understanding about human nature (that’s why I’m an EA and on this forum). I might, had I not seen the connection to long term pleasure, say I was simply seeking “truth” or “kindness” or “harmony” but my moral values that drive me to these “higher” goods are all derivable from my understanding of my own inescapably value-laden experiences and those of others. And btw, I don’t see their reducibility as diminishing in any way, in fact I see this as strengthening, in the same way that scientifically reducing a phenomenon makes it more understandable, more real, rather than stealing the magic away.

The reason I challenged you to look at a moral value you and I might agree on (you can assume I hold pretty standard moral views, I don’t need to provide a list) and see if you can derive this from IVLEs, is because I see people, invariably taking moral positions that appear to implicitly assume my foundational position. I’m suggesting that making this implicit assumption explicit would make communication and agreement about moral issues clearer and more tractable, which could have profound implications for our ability to cooperate and live in peace. I believe if you try this challenge, you’ll find yourself quite capable of deriving moral values from IVLEs.
Thanks again for your comment, I appreciate your input. By challenging you I’m not meaning to be a pain. In my experience, people can often only fully get a view once they’ve genuinely tried it on. You might still disagree, and that’s fine, I’m just asking you to try it on.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 5:58 AM
3 points
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on: UK to cut its international aid budget 40% from 2027
It’s interesting to think of this as a humanitarian arms race in reverse, competition to contribute to international aid has just experienced a massive “disarmament” in the US, allowing the UK “disarm” too. It could also be that Starmer is hoping to placate or disrupt reactionary movements as they inevitably rise in the UK. Ian Bremmer points out that the Europe lags behind the US in terms of these movements.
But it’s all very depressing.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 5:48 AM
11 points
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on: How confident are you that it’s preferable for America to develop AGI before China does?
As of the last couple of months, not confident at all. You make good points about progress made in China, and they go some way to balance human rights abuses (but nothing really balances those), but they’re not really the factors that are at play for me. I’m more concerned with the mental stability of the leadership in the US.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 5:43 AM
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on: Don’t treat probabilities less than 0.5 as if they’re 0
Some make a similar mistake with commonalities between human values, taking what is probably a 90% commonality (in our experience of injury, social rejection, sickness) and dismissing it under the a blanket “everything is subjective, completely unique to each individual”, and concluding therefore that we can’t make any generalisations about shared human values, and therefore are arrogant to believe we can say anything with authority about human wellbeing in general. I think this is a major hurdle to consensus—in fact, a form of consensus denial.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 27, 2025, 3:09 AM
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on: “Full Automation” is a Slippery Metric
This is an interesting question to ask, and as you say “More work thinking along these lines seems useful”.

However, I couldn’t help feeling that you were trying to understand how long something would take, given the current state of technology, and yet making predictions about what tasks technology will be able to perform in the future is at least in part about what the capacity will be in the future, which assumes the capacity and range of abilities will be necessarily greater.

You address this in part, but still posit one person in the loop, which still seems to me like an extrapolation from current tech, rather than assuming new (unforeseen) tech (which has caught us by surprise numerous times in the past few years).

I would also argue that a prompt like...

”Here are the specs for an art competition, create an artwork for it” arguably allows an AI to create their own artwork. If you were to ask an AI now, they might ask follow up questions to get your guidance, but again we are not talking about today’s AIs.

or

“Create a paper for the journal Nature”. Again the article specifies no content, only the journal, leaving the AI to imagine something relevant for the journal.

I don’t think I’d see this (prompting) person in the loop as significant in terms of answering the questions posed in the linked surveys.

In saying this, I’m meaning only to offer a question, I think you’re correct that it is worthwhile thinking about what this means for different industries, and how phenomena like Jevon’s Paradox come into play—I generally think this will play a large role, and will offset many of the woes we might worry about.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 26, 2025, 5:21 PM
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in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: The Stag Hunt—cultivating cooperation to reap rewards
Thanks Ozzie,
I take your point about the wolves as antagonists. It’s funny, as you mention, using human hunters would be problematic (particularly in my audience, or the EA crowd—with probably a higher percentage of ethical vegans than the general population). The wolves were a logical solution to this, given we all accept that wolves hunt deer and hares as a (morally neutral) fact of nature, and they fit the scenario because they’re pack hunters who capitalise on cooperation. I also thought they were more relatable than, say, velociraptors.
Also, as a general rule, I don’t do humans, the characters are always other animals. I suppose I could have done a group of dogs dressed up as hunters, to avoid the antagonist inference, but then we have a sort of anthropomorphic version of the same issue we had with humans. Cartoons are a much trickier beast than is immediately apparent :)
If you’re partial to the Stag Hunt, did you catch my critique of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: The Dilemma’s Dilemma? I’d be interested if you agree.

Non-zero-sum James Feb 9, 2025, 8:26 PM
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in reply to: nathan98000’s comment on: Inescapably Value-Laden Experience—Can We Make Morality Rationalisable?
Why think that pain is inherently bad?

I’m asserting that if “bad” means anything, it means something in reference to an experience of suffering. We can of course play semantic games and use “bad” to mean “cool” or “rotten”, I’m talking about the sort of value that makes an animal (without particular training) generally avoid that experience.”Dispreferred” frames the issue in terms of preference, which seems to emphasise uniqueness of individual experience, where as my meaning would lean more on the commonalities of experience, but that’s more an emphasis thing.

The foundational claim of inescapably value-laden experiences is that we do not get to choose how something feels to us, we may be able to choose to respond in one way or another, but we cannot escape the experience, it has the effect it has.

For instance, we don’t get to choose whether putting our hand in a flame, or stepping on a nail hurts, we can choose to bear it with tears, bravery, anger or humour but we don’t get to choose the value of the experience, that’s laden in the experience itself.
why think that pleasure and pain are the only things that are value-laden?
I’m primarily speaking about moral value here, as in whether something is good or bad, obviously numbers are value-laden too, but that’s beside the point. I believe that we (implicitly) assume that anything with moral value is derived from pleasure and suffering, I’m simply asserting the relationship explicitly—I challenge you to think about values we would agree are moral and see if you can derive them from pleasure and suffering, it’s an interesting, and enlightening experience.

Non-zero-sum James Jan 15, 2025, 8:53 PM
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on: The ugly sides of two approaches to charity
Really nicely written and interesting post. I have one part I’d like to question.

Often defences of inequality take the form “You can either have rich and poor, or you can just have poor”. Which on the face of it is not just a zero-sum frame, but actually a negative-sum frame, which seems an unfair representation until you add the claim that it is inequality itself that allows for the sort of dynamic wealth generation needed to create the rich. The point about Michelangelo and Yo-Yo Ma makes an argument of the same type but regarding cultural riches. But I think this misses the point that cultural dynamism transcends wealth distribution. Take the idea of genius for instance.

I don’t doubt that Yo-Yo Ma is a genius, and that Michelangelo may have been one too, though I think Leonardo is a better candidate for genius. The framing goes if there wasn’t inequality that allowed for funding a life of contemplation for such geniuses they never would have arisen. I think the opposite is more likely.

Let’s assume that Leonardo is a genuine 1 in 10,000 genius. Let’s put him in a population of 1,000,000, where 1% of the population have the capacity to fully reach their potential, while the other 99% live in an agricultural or later industrial state of perpetual labour, and never get to reach their potential. Lucky Leonardo, he’s the one genius who arises in this situation 1,000,000 x 1% = 10,000 and one in 10,000 people are geniuses so, that’s one genius reaching their potential.

So, now let’s allow for a more egalitarian society, where everyone works, but not for ever hour of the day, they get some time to contemplate the world, and be creative. Now out of your population of 1,000,000 you have 100 genuine 1 in 10,000 geniuses, each with a chance of being discovered.

What world is more likely to create the greatest art and have the greatest progress? I think it’s obvious: the latter. You see, it’s important to recognise that we don’t necessarily live in the best of all possible worlds, the past isn’t by definition the best it might have been, so the depictions of old biblical stories by Michelangelo aren’t necessarily the best artworks that might have been created.

I don’t find the decision about Notre Dame difficult in the slightest. It’s a building, it’s not lives, lives have value, buildings only have value in as much as the serve lives, and it’s difficult to make the case that the pleasure or national income that Notre Dame generates gets even close to the benefit of saving the lives that the equivalent funds could save.

There are other interesting points in the post, but this is one I feel could be pushed back against. At the same time I completely agree with @Ian Turner when he points out that criticism of charitable choices is often more prevalent than criticism of not giving to charity at all. So, I think it’s advisable to use positive terminology when assessing efficacy, as “in which of these two good options is better” rather than the zero-sum framing that not effectively giving is tantamount to taking away from a more effective charity.

Non-zero-sum James Nov 24, 2024, 5:57 PM
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in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: A Case for Conscious Significance—an approach to free will & determinism
Thanks for making me aware of Requiredism, this resonates with and strongly overlaps with the my take. Looks like, had I looked a little harder I might have found that what I was looking for was (of course) already out there. Though it was worth fleshing it out myself, and my focus on the centrality of consciousness is important to a wider ethical framework I’m developing. Requiredism seems a good counterpoint to the Compatibilist Illusionism I was attributing to Compatibilism in general.

Non-zero-sum James Nov 3, 2024, 12:18 AM
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in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: Both-sidesism—When Fair & Balanced Goes Wrong
Thanks, I’ve made this edit—the capitalisation comes from the original where it’s more cartoonish and seems less shouty, but here, yes unintentional shouting :)

Non-zero-sum James Oct 15, 2024, 6:38 PM
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in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: Contagious Beliefs—Simulating Political Alignment
Thanks Arturo, and yes, I found it very interesting. I find the passage you’ve pulled particularly interesting in terms of AGI which seems to be following the same notion of “de-instinctivation” substitution narrow hardwiring for the ability to adapt to general situations.
I also found the critique of Utilitarian impartiality interesting, and it helped clarify my thinking in terms of the simulation. This model actually is founded on cognitive bias, treating it as a feature rather than a bug. So, incoming beliefs are only ever adopted when aligned with pre-existing beliefs and yet it is still impartial in that, given a conflicting belief an agent will always choose the strongest coalition of beliefs, letting beliefs with negative marginal value go freely. This is actually a very reasonable way to adopt beliefs (because we can only ever make decisions based on our prior knowledge) and yet has the natural result of bias that we observe in humans.

Non-zero-sum James Oct 11, 2024, 6:00 AM
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in reply to: nathan98000’s comment on: Why People in Poverty Make Bad Decisions
Thanks for providing that link Nathan, that does seem to significantly undermine the Mani et al study. While I agree with you that at this point primary studies should be, by default, seen as not credible, it did help a lot (in terms of convincing me personally) to see a study specifically designed to replicate the Mani et al study.
Do you find any evidence for the conclusions in the post credible? Or are you aware of more credible studies that would support the argument the post makes? You seem to know your stuff, so, I don’t want to waste your time, but I would value your input about whether the post’s position is tenable at all given the available evidence.
I don’t want to be posting nonsense, so depending on the evidence available I would either rewrite it with more reliable evidence, or take it down.