Winning Is for Losers

This is a guest post by Jacob Falkovich.


— Rene Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

I. Eating Dogs




We like exercise, music and cooking. We like professional sports, American Idol and cooking competitions even more.



Our economy is based on companies competing with each other in the marketplace. But if you think that employees in the same company will cooperate for the good of the organization then you haven’t been paying attention to this very blog: organizations merely set the stage for a Darwinian contest in which sociopaths possessing the will to win oppress the clueless and exploit the losers.

If you don’t spend your time thinking of ways to exploit people you’re probably a loser too. You should wake up to the reality of life as competition and follow the example from the Dobu Islanders of Papau New Guinea, a society that embraced this idea completely and without reservations. Ruth Benedict and Sam Harris describe their culture, the epitome of taking this philosophy to the extreme:





— Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape


Huh, this doesn’t actually sound so great.



II. Baking Pies

Life is a game, play to win.

This guy, or this guy, or maybe this guy.

I disagree with all three guys, but only with the second part of the statement. Life is a game, but  there’s more to playing than trying to beat someone. To understand this game better we require some general theory of games. I suggest game theory.






















— Dan Wang, College as an Incubator of Girardian Terror



III. Tits and Tats


This foundation is enough to survive in Harvard or the NBA, but it’s insufficient for a real challenge like OkCupid. For a strategy that works in online dating we need to dig deeper into game theory, and the one game in particular that is most heavily theorized about.



That’s it, that’s the game.

The salient feature of the prisoner’s dilemma is that choosing “defect” makes a player $1,000 richer regardless of what the other player is doing. In the absence of mechanisms to influence each other this usually leads to both players defecting. Of course, if both players chose to cooperate they’d each be better off by $2,000.







IV. Spiky Dicks


— Oscar Wilde















But just being honest is not enough. In accordance with “stronger or stranger,” to avoid competing with everyone else for your partner’s attention, you have to be really irresistible or really weird. The latter is much easier, and works just as well as the former.



Finally, I got my reward:












And when those strategies succeed, they do so magnificently. If you lead off the first date with honesty, vulnerability and commitment and the date turns into a relationship, the relationship will also be based on honesty, vulnerability and commitment. This is worth a lot when so many relationships are based instead on pretense and power games.



V. Fighting Moloch






Scott offers a solution: transhumanism. The goal is to create something or someone that shares our values, and is so strong that it doesn’t have to sacrifice those values for the sake of competition.




It would be something like transhumanism.





If the transhumanists get their way, it may actually happen.

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  1. “From Achilles vs. Paris to Swaggy P vs. D’Lo, many a historic beef among men has started over a woman.”

    Shouldn’t this be “Menelaus vs. Paris” (over Helen) or “Achilles vs Agamemnon” (over Briseis)? Obviously the point still stands, but it’s an important distinction (to fellow pedants).

    • Dealingwithdirt says

      One sad thing is, pathetic really, a guy can see another guy with a girl and think to himself, “Good for him, cute girl. Wish him luck.” Meanwhile, the guy with the girl may be thinking to himself, “How do I get that guy out of here? My girl might be interested in him. He may be a threat to me!” And, therefore the latter guy starts taking all kinds of pot shots at the other guy trying to put him down in the eyes of the girl, trying to make him feel uncomfortable and under attack, so that his empathy has been used against him; and if he does not act quickly, the other guy is going to increasingly inflate his own ego at the decent guy’s expense. One way to snap out of empathy in such a situation is to consider the fact that the guy with the girl would likely pull an equally destructive and aggressive strategy if the table were turned, if the empathetic guy were with a girl then the other guy would likely still try to antagonize him and lower his social value. Imagine then that he is treating you as he wishes to be treated by you.

  2. EverExtruder says


    I made a comment on the SSC piece. Something he missed. The problem with your “honesty cooperative” model is there are numerous “molochs” in society that can only succeed by lying because they are really psychologically messed up and sociopathic. The number of these people is rising. This can be nature or nurture but in many cases they know EXACTLY what they are and the visibility of the commons in modern life give them a window into just how severely no one would play tit-for-tat with them if they knew the truth. They literally grow up lying and get EXTREMELY good at this strategy. They even take pleasure from it (known as dupers delight). They don’t mind getting really good at deception or killing because they know they get to come out on top if they can create that environment. They are the ultimate defectors and are very aware and very anti-social. They hate social.

    This is one of the things they couldn’t fortell with social media. In having vastly more access and visibility into the lives of others numerous people with these tendencies have, in effect, decided that the game isn’t worth playing at all. Lebron James’s seem to be everywhere. Wait. Screw playing. Create a new game. Who can be most anti-social. Your dick will never be as big as the porn stars. Your game never as tight as Clooneys. Your butt as big as Kim’s. Your brain as good as that dude over there. These feelings don’t breed competition or the desire for self-improvement in these people like you or I. They breed FEROCIOUS hatred.

    Those are Molochs. Unfortunately they are multiplying.

    • Aptenodytes says

      So you’re arguing that sociopaths are ruining society by creating bullshit contests. Hmmm….

      • Aptenodytes says

        Have you read the Gervais Principle? It argues just that, as applied to companies.

        • EverExtruder says

          I did and it is sort of like that, but more sociological in application in the instance Jacob provides here. Corporate relationships internally and with other companies can be collaborative, but I’ve found mostly that they are collaborative in the sense that collaboration is a means to defect and screw someone else in a zero sum game.

          I will use the Japanese concept of the Keiretsu system. The companies involved aren’t fundamentally “cooperative” (and as recent history since the lost decade has shown their alliances can quickly fall apart and they become ferocious opponents) in so far as they are enlightenedly (my word) self-interested defectors. They are banding together to win. Win what? Whatever’s there.

          Business is bluntly the act of moving your client’s money from their pocket into yours. You provide goods and services yes, but the pie truthfully very seldom expands. Pie expanding activities are very rare commercially, and in the last 2 centuries have largely been a function of the greatest technological innovation explosion ever seen, not collaboration.

    • Dealingwithdirt says

      Ideally, one competes with one’s own self in order to improve one’s own self; or, if one sees another person with something worth while, material things or intrinsic qualities, then one can admire these and try to emulate them; however, very often people are caught up in comparing themselves with others and then either feeling smug and superior, or threatened and feeling that destructive retaliation is required our of a perverted self centered sense of justice. Malicious, destructive resentment and envy are quite common in society.

  3. EverExtruder says


    The “Lonely Atoms” piece on this blog a few weeks ago is definitely also an outgrowth of what I write above, only in that for a lot boys (especially my patients) the defector/cooperate game results in an anti-social drop-out model, while in girls it is creating narcissism and depression (and cruelty) on a vast scale.

    • Could you elaborate on this please?

      • EverExtruder says

        This will be long. It stems from a fundamentally pessimistic worldview in not insignificant sectors of society and not entirely uninspired from real world events and evidence.

        As an American millennial boy or girl imagine a world where you begin to emerge into an adult perception of reality in an America (and world) where you’ve had two major market realignments (one of them catastrophic depending on your experience), a fundamental transformation of the job market, the shattering of an illusion of security (9/11), 2 wars that have essentially been going on for 15 years (and many little “consequence” wars, i.e. ISIS), a technological revolution in communication that has made you more connected to people than ever before (and potentially more lonely), revolutionized romantic interaction, and given you a window into both in what you see that is good but mostly more in what you see that’s bad…largely because humans focus more on pain and because of the last 15 years of your perceived adult experience. Sorry for the run-on sentence.

        You don’t need to imagine these things because they’re not fiction. They happened. And subconsciously you know implicitly this isn’t cooperation, this is a massive DEFECTION by multiple parties, powerful or otherwise, worldwide, on a huge scale. A defection in a zero sum game that affects your future and your potential personally. This is a zero sum game and you are losing while not even realizing you’d been playing.

        As a boy, many are confronted with some stark realities that don’t conform to the expectations they were told by family or outsiders (teachers, friends) about either the way the world works or what their prospects are. The universe is funny. It creates some people the way they are but those are very isolated cases, but more often nurture takes up the slack. What you see, experience and perceive can absolutely turn you into a sociopath (PTSD). It’s proven. Sociopathy can take on many different forms, buts its fundamental misanthropy and anti-humaneness doesn’t always necessarily align with traditional ideas of what we think of as being a psychopath i.e. serial killer, petty criminal, school shooter, delightful duper, creator of hostile work or relationship environments. You can also defect in other ways that might more closely align with certain MBTI archetypes (I’m currently writing a paper on this very thing). Becoming a NEET and not participating and dropping out, not engaging in romantic relationships of any kind (MGTOW) or just hating women, becoming transgender (it’s just easier to be the girl), or taking opioids and other drugs….but it doesn’t mean you’re not VERY ANGRY like the traditional misanthropes. It just manifests itself differently. I’ve had it described to me as, “Fuck this shit I can’t win. The only way to win is not to play (that’ll screw ‘em).”

        As a girl, you have been mercilessly driven (mostly by other women) to be as good as you can in the expectation that the cake-and-eat-it-too lifestyle can be yours. This lifestyle is constantly pushed in your face by media images specifically aimed at you and your rising education level, independence and purchasing power. Female collaboration has always and will always end where heterosexual romantic relationships begin. Full stop. Natural competitiveness and sensitivity in this arena has always bred both overwhelming desire to conform but also unique instances of psychological cruelty you don’t often see in male communities, but we are starting to. And to top it all off there are fundamentally fewer men to go around, lots more are staying boys, turning girl or gay, or have lifestyles that have rendered them largely undesireable (habitual porn, drug or alcohol use). Plus you’ve had your heart broken several times by romantic partners with more options and less incentive to work at a relationship due to the buffet presented by social media. The job prospects you imagined you’d have haven’t materialized into what you’d perceive you’d have. Your professional career has turned into something fairly boring and in many cases you are now in a workplace filled with more women than men, many of whom are in your situation. Also, you stay in close touch with all your friends but not really in touch because they are further away. But your merciless drive, mercilessly pushed on doesn’t allow you to what the boys do and drop out. It is easier to take SSRIs, eat as a coping mechanism, freeze your eggs and enter therapy where I get to hear about these anxieties all day long. But anxious doesn’t mean they’re not angry, very angry. Again, this isn’t the future they were promised, whoever it was that promised them…

        Fundamentally, the lonely atoms are lonely as an expression of real and very destructive anger. Sociopathic anger and trauma derived from a society that is increasingly pathological and traumatic, and where it feels and in very real ways there is less to go around. They are hitting the defect button en masse but of a different sort. It is a defection as panacea and soma. A sort of “middle-of-the-road I’m going to screw these people by not playing the zero sum game, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to cooperate or be vulnerable with anyone!” game. It is a very lonely segment of the society, and a very lonely future in store, and very convincing link to the prisoner’s dilemma model I think.

        • the alternative explanation is that the governing religious cult – progressive universalism – is hitting some kind of genetic/memetic fracture maximum case, and is no longer working.

          Yes, people are getting disenfranchised, but some of these folk are also on the fringes looking for solutions. Some of these solutions will cause everything to be burnt down. As it turns out ‘take my ball and go home’, actually does ‘show em’ in the sense that either we innovate and come up with a system that can handle the underlying genetic/memetic fracture at scales beyond current, or everybody is going home, and to use a cute notion, we all return to a world made by hand.

          Personally, fuck ’em, let it burn.

          p.s. see if you can spot it. its a jerky right leg syndrome thing, where people keep jerking their right knee while sitting. i’m seeing it everywhere.

          • EverExtruder says

            “Memetic Fracture”. I think this is very apt, and progressive universalism has been a failure. It is responsible for much of the stagnation being felt. You could make an argument that much of the current “cult” and modes of thinking are derived from a desire to make sense of and atone for the greatest recent catastrophe (and possibly greatest catastrophe period) of Western Civilization – the crash and semi-pseudo suicide pact of the combined conflagrations of WWI and WWII. No one of the colonialized peoples nor ourselves could believe that something that destructive was possible before it happened, or could get past the knowledge and imagery of 100+ million deaths that occurred between 1914 and 1945, not to mention those killed in all the geo-political and internal violence that was a direct result of those calamities. It is still shocking today when you think about it. It was an ego body blow to what many non-western people’s and ourselves thought of as the “masters of the universe”. In effect it destroyed a narrative of superiority and capability (not entirely undeserved) that had been 500-600 years in the making. We are still paying politically, globally, and psychologically for this narrative crash today, both its historical occurrences but also the failure of the political philosophies we created to make sense of it.

            I wonder if this is what the last decades of the Roman empire felt like. That idea that the lights are technically on but people have pretty much checked out with an understanding that a reform of the system – to innovate a solution to a severe structural problem – may be infeasible. That letting the city burn may in fact be a more feasible because it would serve as a sign-post for the end of an era, the end of one problem (finally) and the beginning of another. People usually only change when the cost of changing is less than the cost of staying the same. When that cost inversion happens, it is usually very rapid and very traumatic regardless of whether or not it turns out to beneficial.

            I hope a solution is found and that an incentivization to not “let it burn” is revealed, but the lonely atoms, the Japanese demographic crisis, and the premium mediocre life of maya millennial suggests otherwise.

  4. Aptenodytes says

    Falkovitch, thanks for bringing your I telkect into ribbonfarm (or was it Venkat?). What led you to your current dialectic about zero-sum games?

    • Aptenodytes says

      *intellect. I was typing from a phone so my bad.

    • Venkat brought me to Ribbonfarm. What brought me to thinking about zero-sum games is me finding zero-sum thinking at the bottom of almost every terrible idea I hear about.

      People propose economic policies that would impoverish the entire world by assuming that whatever hurts businesses/rich people must help employees/poor people and vice versa. Interminable gender culture wars that reject the idea that men and women actually like each other and can get along. Zero-sum politics, zero-sum international conflicts, zero-sum propaganda…

      It’s very hard to convince people to find common ground with their enemies on public issues like politics and culture wars, but I think that people can warm up to looking for cooperation by starting with their personal lives. My ultimate goal is world peace, and the way I get there is by telling people how to be nicer on first dates :)

  5. Christopher says

    I don’t know the game-theoretic name for this, but it seems to me that the stakes of the game can themselves transform whether the game should be considered zero sum or not.

    Here’s what I mean: I think it would be pretty conventional to describe a boxing match as a zero sum game. There’s a winner, there’s a loser, and whichever benefits one player necessarily makes the other more likely to lose.

    So… how does game theory explain the ending of Rocky? Rocky loses to Apollo Creed in a zero sum game. So why does the ending feel so good? Why does it seem like Rocky came out ahead in the end if the game is zero sum?

    On the other hand, in a hypothetical ending where Rocky is about underground fights to the death, it’s not going to be a very happy ending if Apollo Creed murders Rocky.

    Actually, now that I’ve written it out, I don’t think that stakes are an adequate explanation for what is going on at the end of Rocky. Rocky isn’t fighting to the death, but the stakes are high. If Rocky is knocked out in the first round before he even gets in a punch, that’s also a depressing ending. The stakes aren’t life or death, but they are there.

    Simply throwing the game or being indifferent to the outcome also changes the movie and while you could still have a happy ending for Rocky, in those cases it would be a different movie.

    For that ending to work, he has to be trying. There have to be real stakes, it is important that he beats Apollo Creed… And then when he doesn’t, it’s a happy ending.

    Now that I’ve written all this out, I’d be very curious to see what game theory says about the underlying structure of Rocky’s match with Apollo Creed. It seems to me that the only way for it to be a positive sum game is for both Rocky and Apollo to treat the boxing match as a zero sum game. If they abandon the competition of a zero sum game, there can’t be a positive outcome for either of them.

    Anyway, in my reading I’m starting to become really convinced that one of the sources of modern malaise is that it is becoming harder and harder to imagine being Rocky. If Apollo Creed beats you, that means you shouldn’t have played at all. The reasons for this are myriad, and you probably can’t escape that feeling just by saying you ought to, but I think it is a problem.

  6. TransdermalCelebrant says

    I just posted a status as a response to a screenshot on Facebook today…

  7. Jacob,

    Probably a little late to the game but here it goes. Regarding dating, you should check out Mark Manson. He wrote a dating book about how to attract women with honesty essentially advising exactly what you were talking about. Be completely honest, and vulnerable, by laying all your cards out on the table from the get-go. If she’s interested, then great. If not, then you’ve just saved both of you lots of time.

    Maybe related: Peter Thiel talks about a favorite interview question in Zero To One. He asks applicants what they believe to be true, but are hesitant to voice around peers because of fear of reprisal. Seeing how Thiel was a student of Girard’s I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a connection.

  8. Halikaarnian says

    Good, thought-provoking article (I tend to rate the interestingness of such things by the proportion of linked articles in a piece I actually click on to read later–in yours, I clicked most of them). However, I think you cheap out at the end in your assumptions about transhumanism.


    1. Yes, religions turn their followers to violence against the outgroup, but this very often happens with heaps of provocation (some of it fervently wished for) *from* said outgroup–discrimination, derision, actual violence are all very effective ways to radicalize a group against you, and spur them to violence. Given the radical nature of what transhumanists propose, and the obvious opposition this does and will bring from various religious fundamentalists, some of which have plenty of power and an ever-present need for poor deviants to make examples out of (wonder how transhumanists fare in Saudi Arabia!), I don’t have any trouble believing in the eruption of radical, and violent transhumanist sects.

    2. I think it’s pretty obvious that plenty of transhumanists and fellow travelers are unmoored from reality. The potential for clickbait and bad media glosses on transhumanist themes is just too great. As its’ profile rises, I likewise have no doubt that we’ll see charismatic cults which adopt the surface tenets of transhumanism in the service of very ordinary cultic aims–ie, delivering money, white limousines, and underage concubines to the guys at the top in the white robes.

    This isn’t to beat up on transhumanism, a broad movement which I’m generally sympathetic to and optimistic about. But blind faith in the internal mechanics of the transhumanist movement transcending ordinary human/sociopathic behavior that quickly is quite frankly unrealistic.

  9. Contaminated NEET says

    >Cooperate at times even when the other person seems to defect, just in case.

    That’s not tit-for-tat, that’s always-cooperate. It’s a strategy for suckers and victims – even worse than always-defect. The point of tit-for-tat is to meet cooperation with cooperation and defection with defection. If the other person seems to defect, then you defect on him right back.


    No. Absolutely not. This is idiotic. If I’ve got 10,000 years of potential cooperate-cooperate ahead of me, then a mere human lifespan of being defected on is always worth it, on the chance that my saint-like martyrdom will win the predators over. Forget it.

    You’re getting moist-eyed and moralistic about what is really only a selfish, overly-rationalist, Homo-economicus-type rule for maximizing my own individual payoff. Tit-for-tat does not teach us that all men are brothers, nor that I should do unto others as I would have them do unto me.

    • What are your views on NEEThood?

      • Contaminated NEET says

        It’s not good. We’re living in the human equivalent of Calhoun’s mouse heaven: NEEThood is one of the pathological responses we make to a ludicrously overcrowded “social space.”

  10. “This isn’t the case for the student who is much smarter than her peers. She welcomes stronger classmates.”

    Quit reading on that “she”.
    Felt like a competition for status was ongoing, and not only I never join any, I don’t even stand watching any.

    • Contaminated NEET says

      I see where you’re coming from, but there’s no escape from status competition, even if you’re posting from a hermit’s cabin deep in the wilderness.

    • I’ve read >20M words in the last two years, and by now with straightforward text only “they” fails to invoke the brief secondary analysis of why a generic is gendered. “he” evokes no surprise pre 1900 as I read the language as a dialect, nor does “she” in relevant spheres. It’s a shame people learned to see politics in language, but now there’s no going back.

  11. Your OKCupid strategy reminds me of the time I wanted to pick from the thousand or so sample songs posted by SXSW participants. Some maniac or maniacs had managed to rate them all on a Likert scale and there was a little metadata available. I reasoned that if something was rated 5 it was either excellent, or massively suited to the rater. Similarly, anything rated 1 was either dreck, or massively unsuited to the rater. I had no reason to believe the rater shared my tastes, so it was possible that something the rater despised intensely might suit me just as intensely. However, the vast numbers of 3s were almost certain to be what they were rated as – mediocrity. So I filtered the 1s and 5s, randomised them, and then made an arbitrary selection. I was well pleased with the results.