Explore every episode of the podcast Non • Zero • Sum James

This week’s guest; Liv Boeree—host of the Win-Win Podcast, has been a key inspiration for nonzerosum.games from the start.

Liv studied astrophysics and rose to prominence in the world of high-stakes poker. But for me, the public discussion she’s fuelled about using game theory and specifically win-win games, Moloch, effective altruism, and systems thinking to solve many pressing issues in the world today, is what interests me and made me realise there was an audience for these topics.

This week you all get to meet her, as we sit down for our first ever Video podcast—an expansive discussion about psychopathic competitiveness, Moloch and his new friend Norma, mutually assured destruction, AI swarms and some fun stuff too; computer games, books and experimental dialogues.

Chapters:

00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:28 Interview Starts
00:08:03 OpenAI swarm hacks Hugging Face & Mythos first strike
00:13:16 The Super-Defector
00:15:58 A glimmer of hope
00:18:53 Collaborative competition
00:30:28 Liv's obsession with Polytopia
00:35:41 Making games more win-win
00:37:49 Moloch & Norma
00:45:35 Daniel Suarez’s “Daemon”
00:46:43 Returning to win-win game development
00:50:28 Neutropia
00:52:52 The Meta-Crisis
00:58:17 10 Principles of Win-Win
01:02:08 The end of M.A.D.
01:06:04 The importance of storytelling
01:09:37 Faces of X & The Anti-Debate
01:12:30 Effective Altruism's fascination with AI X-risk
01:17:53 The future Liv wants to see

Mentions:

Win-Win Podcast

Faces of X

Elowyn: Quest of Time

Neutropia

Emmett Shear's Interview (with sketch-notes)

Wes Roth on Mythos first strike

The Super-Defector

The concept of a dividual raises an interesting question about how something can be both an entity, but also divisible. It's one of those terms which, since I've learned it, I see it everywhere, it's felt more and more relevant to the world today, as if we're living a new era of the dividual.

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For the original post and links, visit: https://nonzerosum.games/dividual.html

A classic behavioural model... perhaps not entirely based on scientific evidence, but an instructive story none the less.

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For the original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/crabbucket.html

More and more my social feeds are populated with these little treats—interspecies friendships that give us a glimpse into the world of non-zero-sum interactions.

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To enjoy all the visuals with the audio... visit: https://nonzerosum.games/furryfriends.html

Kicking off a series of episodes focused on non-zero-sum games in nature, beginning with a cooperative game with the highest of stakes.

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For the original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/parableofapolyp.html

Our very first podcast interview, and starting strong with a Professor of Game Theory, Vince Knight from the University of Cardiff all the way on the other side of the world in Wales.

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We sat down to talk about all sorts of applications of game theory in our personal and political lives, from his cutting edge research. A fabulous communicator and advocate for making the world a better place through game theory—a perfect interview to start a new feature of the podcast.

This episode is a special one, with a special guest—my friend Coach Stuart (the Moose) Krohn. I explore Stuart's impact as a specialist in creating leaders.

In response to Elizier Yudkowski's essay "The Futility of Emergence" I take a very long time explaining some ways to define and recognise emergence in a way that is useful.

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For the original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/emergencespirals.html

What does living in an entropic universe mean for beauty... or meaning itself?

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Original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/emergenceisbeautiful.html

This episode explores Susan Blackmore's concept of Temes and the importance of replicators when understanding emergence.

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Original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/replicators.html

In the 5th part in our Emergence series, we look at a key mechanism of emergence; substrates.

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Visit the original post here: https://nonzerosum.games/substrates.html

This is one where you'll want to visit the page (https://nonzerosum.games/graviton.html) because it has an interactive gravity simulation that is central to the piece. This is a (speculative) proof of concept that went a bit further than initially expected, and likely a strong candidate for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

How does emergence happen in a world determined by the second law of thermodynamics? It turns out that the universal trend towards entropy allows for pockets of emergence... as long as it increases entropy in the end!

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For the original post visit: https://nonzerosum.games/emergencevsentropy.html

Now let's start looking at the dynamics of emergence—how to simple rules give rise to complexity. To do this we'll look at a simulation called "Conway's Game of Life" to see this process in action.

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To play with the interactive simulations, visit: https://nonzerosum.games/conwaysgame.html

Imagine you wake up one morning to a phone call, you've won a million dollars... well, you have, kinda, your prize though is consciousness. Join us on an 8-part series about non-zero-sumness at the very foundations of physics

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https://nonzerosum.games/cosmiclottery.html

Ever told someone your idea, only to hear them pass it off as their own? Well done, that's how passing on ideas works.

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https://nonzerosum.games/takingcredit.html

Want to work together to make something greater than the sum of our parts. Let's talk!

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https://nonzerosum.games/collaborativecorner.html

It's our birthday... well, it was when the original post was written, so this episode goes behind the scenes at the site, focusing in on five creative principles (six actually) that can be applied to any creative project.

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For the original post, pictures and diagrams visit: https://nonzerosum.games/creativeprinciples.html

This episode kicks off a group of episodes about creativity, beginning with my response to the proliferation of generative AI "art", and how it won't change my process, or art in general—it's something altogether different, like photography.

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For the original post, links and pictures visit: https://nonzerosum.games/crappydrawings.html

So, we've seen how reasoning by analogy can help people express their genius, but what about us normies? In this final episode of our Polymaths series we ask how this approach can help us, and how first principles can really backfire on a social level

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/polymaths3.html

What's not so good about first principles?

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/polymaths2.html

This three-part series looks at two different ways that genius and innovation manifest in the world: first principles thinking and arguing by analogy.

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/analogies1.html

This series is not just about raising concerns, throughout we have been focused on specific and philosophical solutions to the problems raised and in this final post we gather these all in one place, ending the series with you hopefully feeling empowered to be part of the solution.

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/alignment6.html

In this episode we ask if AI might be able to help with humanity's own alignment problem. Could making AI's primary objective be alignment, and have its current functionality grow out of that—performing tasks and answering questions for instance—as an extension of a general principle of aligning with human interests?

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For the original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/alignment5.html

This episode looks at the issue at three different scales; the human, the political and the biological.

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/alignment4.html

What do Aristotle, J.S Mill, Richard Nixon, Ibram X. Kendi and John Key have in common? They all tried to, at some point combine the interests of the individual and the collective.

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For the original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/alignment3.html

In part 2 of this alignment series, we look at humanity's own alignment issue.

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For the original post, links and pictures visit: https://nonzerosum.games/alignment2.html

The first in a series about humanity's own alignment problem... which we'll need to deal with before we can approach goal alignment in AI.

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For the original post, notes and links: https://nonzerosum.games/alignment1.html

In this post I try to distill the "why" of nonzerosum.games.

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/why.html

A hopeful conclusion to Andrew Tane Glen's series "Why Cooperate"

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See the original post and links here: https://nonzerosum.games/whycooperate3.html

Andrew Tane Glen continues his 3-part series "Why Cooperate"

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for the original post and links: https://nonzerosum.games/whycooperate2.html

this week I've invited Andrew Tane Glen to read his guest post "Why Cooperate". Andrew a software engineer and an Aristotle scholar (with a Masters in Philosophy) and also my best mate, with whom I talk philosophy on the regular. His unique creative and analytical philosophical approach often yields unexpected insights—insights that have impacted the way I see the world. His conception of why we cooperate, which introduces his concept of the super defector is one that I return to often, so a while back I asked him to write about it. This is his three part series, why cooperate?

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/whycooperate1.html

Written on the day of Alexei Navalny's death, a meditation on courage & sacrifice.

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For the original post with links and resources: https://nonzerosum.games/oneperson.html

This one created a bit of a stir when I first wrote the post. Hopefully people can see that the message is a positive one, for everyone.

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For the original post and links, visit: https://nonzerosum.games/masculinity.html

For supplementary diagrams and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/npc.html

A funny story that wasn't so funny at the time (as is so often the case).

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For the original post visit: https://nonzerosum.games/nomatterwhereyougetto.html

The system didn't and doesn't need to be this way.

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For the original post visit: https://nonzerosum.games/painejustice.html

I'm always trying to picture in my mind what sort of society I want to live in. To do this is to balancing the freedoms I'm willing to forego in order to provide rights that we determine to be essential to a healthy society.

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This week's episode explores the new way of looking at Rights & Liberties, as a way of codifying this process, rather being used as vaguely interchangeable terms.

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For the original post and references visit: https://nonzerosum.games/rightsandliberties.html

In this episode we make the case for giving money to people who are bad with money!

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/poverty.html

I will be making the case that somewhat counter-intuitively, by saving lives we actually reduce over-population.

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For the full post and references: https://nonzerosum.games/savinglives.html

've been wrong about the meaning of Meritocracy, and for good reason, there are many different definitions—the term has been used as a pejorative, as an aspirational term, as a definition of a government, and as a general way of allocating credit to individuals. But I understood it as this: A society where a person's rewards reflect their efforts (merit)

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For links, pictures and references check out the original post here: https://nonzerosum.games/effortocracy.html

This episode begins a series on luck and circumstances, and asks "What do we owe to each other?"

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For the original post and links visit: https://nonzerosum.games/saidi.html

This is one of those ideas that constantly recurs in my mind throughout my day, one of those perspective-affecting mental models that helps me navigate the world, and hopefully will do the same for you.

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For the full post and links: https://nonzerosum.games

A lot of politics out in the world appears to me at any rate to be based around a sort of kill-or-be-killed mentality, is if we live an the wild, and need to let nature sort the strong from the weak... but that's not the actual world we live in, so that political mentality is... well, nonsense.

A rambling stream of consciousness about what to do in a society, like ours, when we, thankfully don't let citizens needlessly die.

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For the full ramble, links and sources: https://nonzerosum.games/wedontletpeopledie.html

Let's take a look through our crystal ball at Glass Bottle Utopia. What are the problems, and who's solving them?

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For the original article, links and pictures visit: https://nonzerosum.games/betterrecycling3.html

In part 2 of our series on recycling we look into the problems with plastic recycling and the importance of disincentivising the use of plastics.

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For the original article, including useful links and references visit: https://nonzerosum.games/betterrecycling2.html

This series of 3 episodes are about recycling, and specifically an idea I'd like to put forward as a workable solution for governments, business and the environment—8 different standard-sized glass bottles and jars.

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For illustrations and sources visit the original page: https://nonzerosum.games/betterrecycling.html

Moral licensing is a well researched and understood phenomenon—I'm proposing something slightly different: negative moral licensing, where, instead of using our previous good actions to justify misbehaviour, we use the real or perceived misbehaviour of others to license ours.

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https://nonzerosum.games/morallicensing2.html

Moral licensing is when you use previous virtuous actions to justify less than virtuous behaviour next... There are lots of studies referenced in this episode, you can find links to them all in the text of the original post. Have fun exploring the links, and of course all the pictures.

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Original Post: https://nonzerosum.games/morallicensing1.html

I have a confession: As a teenager I was desperate to learn how to win friends and influence people, to think and grow rich and develop the habits of highly effective people (seven to be precise)—I am James and I am a self-help-oholic.

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Find the original blog + links here: https://nonzerosum.games/positivedoublestandard.html

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If you'd like to check out the emergence series (mentioned in the episode) here it is: https://nonzerosum.games/emergencespirals.html