You have neglected the negative-sum lose-lose situation being mislabled as win-lose.
War is the classic lose-lose situation that is mislabeled as win-lose. No one "wins" a war. After a war, everyone is worse off, just some are more worse off than others.
I think the problem is that the zero-point shifts, where if you survive a war, you feel like you have won something where in reality you just didn't lose your life.
It depends on what one assumes the motives for war are. If they are economic then I think a case can be made everyone ends up worse off. But if power is at stake, then war can indeed leave the nominal victor better off (from the perspective of motive).
By the way, attempts to characterize human psychological based on what life was like in the Savanna (or whatever environment humans are supposed to be designed by Darwinian forces for) need serious qualification, at best. Speaking metaphorically, evolution is an accident; where "successful", a fortuitous coincidence.In some cases an organism ends up with a set of traits that work out for it in a given environment and it lives long enough to reproduce (even if living in a great deal of pain). Obviously the given environment will impose certain limits, and these limits may lead to certain "modifications" if not extinction. But the assumption the organism is well designed (well adapted, if one prefers secular terminology) for environment X therefore automatically poorly (or less well) designed for environment Y, where X precedes Y, is misleading. Logically, we may be better adapted for our present environment than any previous one we've inhabited (and one can come up with imaginary environments that are far superior than any we've experienced)--it's question we can only answer by looking at X and Y and the organism's traits very carefully, and then perhaps only with a great deal of uncertainty. No one talks about the hand being well adapted to the Savanna and ill adapted the modern city yet analogous arguments re: psychology crop up constantly--esp. re: politics and economics, where extreme irrational prejudices operate.
One "interesting" thing about philosophy seems to be that as soon as a philosophical issue gets a definitive answer, it ceases to be part of philosophy and instead becomes either mathematics or science. For example, physical sciences were once "natural philosophy". Many social sciences were also once the domain of philosophy; economics, oddly enough, first developed as an offshoot of moral philosophy, and "philosophy of mind" predates the practice of psychology, cognitive science, neurobiology, and the badly-named "computer science" (which is really just a branch of mathematics).
Philosophy seems to be roughly equivalent to the study of confusing questions; when a question is no longer confusing, it stops being philosophy and instead becomes something else.
I agree with the general argument. I think (some) philosophy is an immature science, or predecessor to a science, and some is in reference to how to do things better, therefore subject to less stringent, but not fundamentally different, standards than science--political philosophy, say (assuming, counterfactually, political thinking were remotely rational). And of course a lot of philosophy is just nonsense--probably most of it. But economics can hardly be called a science. If anything, the "field" has experienced retrograde evolution since it stopped being part of philosophy.
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I think the term "abstract reasoning" is being conflated with acting on good or bad information (among other things). E.g., in most cases, one basically has to take it on faith ice cream is good or bad. And since most people aren't in a position to <em>rationally</em> make a confident choice re: the examples the author provides or comparable ones that could be imagined, agnosticism would seem the only rational alternative.*
More generally, I think a lot of these problems stem from radically defective education (if people aren't merely mostly morons as the author implies at one point: "Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out.")**. We don't get experience from a young age in figuring things out for ourselves. Instead we are merely told what to believe and not to believe (based on "respect for authority")--a recipe for making terrible decisions in later life if ever there was one.
Finally, I think the author is lumping a lot of different problems together that seemingly shouldn't be. In one case the problem may be "strategy", another ideology...ignorance, laziness etc. Apart from the fact ones stated goal is often not the real goal at all. One really needs, I think, to do a lot more work examining actual cases before attempting to pontificate on the matter. As far as I can see almost no actual work has been done...much like "postulating what one wants..."
*Of course the implication is we don't eat ice cream to be healthy on the basis of expert claims. But this raises all kinds of further questions, invoking the application of more "abstract reasoning" before we can decide wether to trust these experts (if we are really trying to be rational, that is).
**You're telling me the 5% figure wasn't pulled out of someone's ass--please!