Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

It's more like in as much as people just have like raw preferences, they're like, I just want to benefit me and you just want to benefit you.

And there's like no real way that we can reconcile it.

There's no way we can come to agree on what the good thing to do with resources is, where it's like you have less interest in allowing the other person to advocate for themselves.

Yeah, let's talk a bit more about this competition issue.

So

I feel like a very common dialectic when people are talking about gradual disempowerment and all things along these lines is someone will say, couldn't there be this harmful competitive dynamic that would lead resources to be wasted on like a zero sum competition or even a negative sum competition?

And someone else might say, well, couldn't we coordinate

to make that not happen and make it good.

And then some might come back and say, that would be difficult.

Or even if you did that, then at the next stage, there'll be a different sort of competition that will be like negative sum or zero sum and it'll all end up getting wasted.

And it kind of just goes back and forth like this with like, well, maybe we could coordinate in order to avoid that.

And then like, well, maybe here's like a different way that things could go badly.

Am I like, yeah, understanding that correctly?

Maybe are there any like examples of this basic dialectic that haven't come up in the conversation so far?

Yeah.

So we've talked about some sort of runaway competitions so far.

I guess maybe the furthest we got out in time was there's a lot of competing over a fixed welfare pie, a fixed redistribution pie that might be going to humans or other non-productive entities, you might call them.

Are there any rounds of competition that occur later than that?

Yeah, I listened to that talk yesterday.

So it's Joe Carl Smith, How Goodness Competes.