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Mestroyer comments on Dark Arts 101: Winning via destruction and dualism - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's not a zero-sum game, and you know it, and good dark artists know it, so either this post is supposed to be funny, you're straw-manning dark artists to signal you aren't one of them, or you're trying to shock us with how dark you are. Probability of useful material about how dark arts work, intended to defend against them: low. Probability of useful material about how to succeed darkly by a skilled dark artist: low.
The arena you're practicing the dark arts in also isn't immediately clear. Eventually it looks like you're talking about politics, which makes it unlikely that you've actually put this to practice successfully.
If the players of the game are the all minds in concept space (with the appropriate weightings, since this set is infinite), then I think it might be reasonable to say that life is a zero-sum game.
There are some players have no ability to control the world unless we simulate them. However, since it is possible for us to simulate them, if we wanted to represent life as a game, we would have to include all of them as at least potential players.
We couldn't simulate all of them. We won't simulate most of them. A mind is not a player unless it actually shows up and makes some decisions. Most minds won't.
Fine, maybe there are some non-computable minds in concept space, but that is okay. I think that all the minds that we could potentially simulate should be counted as players. Usually in game theory, you don't talk about new players being added, so I think that the correct model is that these potential players choose a strategy which only has an effect if their minds are simulated.
Further, I think this is a very important ethical question. I think clearly we should not give equal rights to all potential minds that are not simulated, because many of them cancel each other out. I feel like my morals only care about the actually realized minds (i.e. those that at some point gain some kind of power), which makes me wonder if maybe I should care about minds with an amount proportional the amount of power that that mind has over the world.
It's not just non-computable minds, there are minds that require too much computing power. Anyway, the zero-sum game where you give equal weight to agents that actually exist and agents that have almost no chance of existing is not the same game PhilGoetz was modeling reality with when he originally called it zero-sum.
Okay, but even with minds that could be simulated, the same argument works.
And you are right, while I think this is an important question, it has nothing to do with with the fact this PhilGoetz's model.
This doesn't seem like a very practical way to represent "life" in terms that human beings actually have to deal with.
From a selfish game theory perspective, no, but I think it is interesting to think about when trying to figure out exactly what you mean by things like "utilitarianism"