Comment by Chiba-City | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chiba-City | Hacker News Reader

There are no debates. There are dialogs. Any contest is staged. I avoid all contests. Our education system, media messaging and fictional narratives are all conflict based. Nothing in real life is like that. Anyone SHOUTING-AT someone at Harvard (or around me) gets kicked out. You just call the police.

Young folks (some older ones) here never realize the is nothing to win and there are no prizes. Go on YouTube and hear great dialogues between Buddhists, Catholics, Anglicans, Suffis and so on. There are no cage fights. That is 100% propaganda. None of us will "Win the Matrix." The Matrix is a silly fiction.

It can take modern people raised on propaganda hero/villain narratives months, years or lifetimes to readjust. Disagreement is not conflict. Positional goods (first, fastest, best) worth having are very rare. Life is pretty good 24/7/365 depending upon distributions of our mutual attentions. I am autistic and had to read the finer manuals to liberate myself. I try to help others (including some DC vets).

Just to repeat: there are no debates and all contests are staged. [Edits: typos, paras]

At the same time, we do have to collectively make decisions with real impacts, involving some people benefiting and some others getting hurt, and not always can everyone be persuaded to sign onto the socially agreed decision.

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But for more on your point, I recommend Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games, https://amzn.com/0029059801/

I have "fight" in me. Fight is good. The trick is applying it. I am trying to write an article, but provisionally we find "contours of adversity." There are tons of examples like "HVAC power consumption" for servers or "inflammation" for North American eaters. Once we map out stakeholders in the current "state of adversity" we find human specific institutional obstacles in our supply chains habitually feeding off the adversities. Those become the de facto "enemies" of better new options absent much moral theorizing or imagination. A very sound and shared 1980-90's Netizen principle was "IP routes around obstacles." In the field, those obstacles fight back like crazy and often enjoy political allies. Separating those concerns between "problem space" and "solution space" makes for better shared strategies for early teams and growing companies. I am trying to lay down schematic methodological formulations for better conceptualization of value adding and enduring entrepreneurship channeling that beautiful "fight" of human progress.

Thanks for the book recommendation. That looks like a winner. FWIW, primate biology in big organizations or around family formation have much bigger negative impacts on achievement than I would have realized as a younger man. The odd "zero sum games" around mate selection and status seeking can be too real.

Interesting, the concept of dialectic stretches all the way back to Plato, even though Hegel (and later Marx) are most known for it. The Socratic dialectic operates by the principle of questioning, and through questioning internal inconsistency is shown. The most important part here however is that this dialectic wasn't a debate, it was conducted for the purpose of improving the "opponent"'s soul by freeing them of contradictions.

Whether this is possible now, I don't know, but I think it should be fostered. In the same way, I think attachment to views is the cause of many arguments, which I am guilty of engaging in.

The concept of dialectic is so powerful it was applied to many processes, usually as thought experiment. For example, Engels wrote:

>Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection.

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