Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

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> I am talking about a made-up phrase, coined more than seventy years ago by John von Neumann – zero-sum game

> I shall now explain to you exactly what “zero-sum game” means in several thousand well-chosen words.

... several thousand words of dubious quality ...

> Under these very restrictive and special conditions – a two person game with a finite set of outcomes in which the players have strictly opposed preferences for compound lotteries of the outcomes – it is possible fairly easily to show that the sum of the utilities assigned by the two players to any outcome or lottery of outcomes will sum to 1.

> In particular, no game or game-like situation with three or more players can be a zero-sum game.

Bullcrap.

Just because von Neumann used "zero-sum game" to describe his conclusions about a certain 2-player game doesn't grant permanent monopoly of the phrase to that exact situation.

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I shall now explain to you exactly what “zero-sum game” means in several well-chosen words: A zero-sum game is one in which summation of utility among participants is fixed, regardless of choices made.

(The definition exists despite that fact that -- like everything else in economics -- utility aggregatation or utility itself are controversial concepts.)

I skipped to his last paragraph or two, which in only a few hundred words summed up his point. Your sentence is much better -- this man seems to think that he's far more intelligent than the rest of us, and yet he admits to being a Marxist.

I find this to be interesting, since every real-world instantiation of anything resembling Marxism has resulted in widespread famine and poverty. I practice engineering, which deals in applications, and I find it difficult to understand those who cling to a theory without concern for how well practical applications of the theory work out. That's an attitude of willful ignorance, which doesn't strike me as particularly intelligent ... but maybe that's just because I'm so far below his level :).

Ooh, is it ad hominem time already?

So playing devils advocate, what would you say about American capitalism?

Update: It turns out the great von Neumann came back to extend the zero-sum game to other cases https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/balm-for-soul.h...

I agree. He's one of those obnoxious philosophers who thinks his new way to show something as not being well-defined proves he's always right.

Quite generous, referring to him as a philosopher. I mistook his 'philosophy' for a bad case of verbal diarrhea. I think he could benefit from George Orwell's rules:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The whole article is /r/iamverysmart material.

> A zero-sum game is one in which summation of utility among participants is fixed [...]

[...] at zero. Otherwise it would be a constant-sum game. Otherwise, agree!

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