This is great, especially the ‘containers’ model—but it doesn’t factor in the explicitly adversarial portions of the game. Sometimes we grow by directly attacking other people’s slice of the pie, rather than pushing everyone out to make the pie bigger. And sometimes we grow by holding the pie tight so no one can push, and then waiting for someone to directly attack someone else for a slice of the pie, and then coordinating everyone else to attack that person for defecting on the group, and then being better at taking up the space that they used to occupy because we planned the whole thing from the beginning. And sometimes we grow by waiting for someone else to play the Machiavellian lets-you-and-him-fight game, and then darting in and stealing the scraps. And all these things actually happen more often than the pie simply growing, and I wish we attended to them more.
This is great, especially the ‘containers’ model—but it doesn’t factor in the explicitly adversarial portions of the game. Sometimes we grow by directly attacking other people’s slice of the pie, rather than pushing everyone out to make the pie bigger. And sometimes we grow by holding the pie tight so no one can push, and then waiting for someone to directly attack someone else for a slice of the pie, and then coordinating everyone else to attack that person for defecting on the group, and then being better at taking up the space that they used to occupy because we planned the whole thing from the beginning. And sometimes we grow by waiting for someone else to play the Machiavellian lets-you-and-him-fight game, and then darting in and stealing the scraps. And all these things actually happen more often than the pie simply growing, and I wish we attended to them more.