The problem isn't that life is unfair, it's that you don't know the rules (2015)

>> Life is not a zero-sum game.

That might have been true in the past, but with 7.5 billion people on the planet we are aproaching the point when life becomes zero-sum.

What I mean is that in pre-historic era the caveman that didn't get along with his tribe could just leave them, go find some uncharted territory and make a living from what he could hunt and build with his own hands.

Even in Middle Ages, discovery of America was a game changer: suddenly the people that would otherwise had to live in poverty were given an opportunity to go to the New World and become rich with nothing but hard work.

Nowadays, we are using so much resources that we have to compete for them. You cannot easily increase yearly supply of oil, or gas, or food, at least not on global scale. Also, in developed economies unemployment does not really exist so to find employees for your startup you need to take them out from other companies. That's makes the life more and more competitive.

Competition does not imply zero-sum. But for competition, how would society continually reorganize itself for the better? If everybody got to do whatever they most wanted to do, we'd all be princesses and basketball players. Competition is precisely how society achieves non-zero-sum outcomes.

Unfortunately, the popular notion of competition overloads it with alot of cultural baggage and imbues it with meaning where there is no intrinsic meaning.

>Life is not a zero-sum game.

Life might not be, but most things people actually want, are.

If you want to work at X, you have to compete with others for the same job. If you want to start your own company, you have to compete with other companies for your market. If you want to marry person Y, you have to compete with people also interested in Y. If you want to be a writer, you have to compete with other writer's for people's attention. And so on -- and we haven't even touched the real competitive fields, like pop music and sports.

>Choose the path of abundance and create new value for others over the path of scarcity and competition

What would that mean in concrete terms for someone wanting to make a living as an X, and there are not many job positions available?

The article is concerned with unfairness in life in the sense of what people get (from society, other people, institutions, jobs, etc) not accidents or acts of nature.

Judges and referees are important because in our system they represent our conflict resolution process.

But there are other conflict resolution processes, like flipping a coin, trial by ordeal, killing someone, or just walking away, that don't involve third parties. Historically those may have been just as prevalent.

Those alternative processes are often horribly inefficient, though, in terms of producing optimal outcomes. So more advanced societies employ experts to apply a complex system of rules designed to minimize losses when cooperation fails. And for the foreseeable future only expert humans are capable of applying those rules. Nonetheless, people are usually free to agree to follow simpler processes, like coin flipping.

>number of people you affect is true but it's multiplied by your impact/value over other offers

Something which the article does hammer on for several paragraphs...