Except for the child and the blacksmith, all of these seem like dominance conflicts to me. The blacksmith plausibly becomes a dominance conflict too once you consider how he ended up with the resources and what tasks he’s likely to face. You contrast these with conflicts between human groups, but I’d compare to e.g. a conflict between a drunk middle-aged loner who is looking for a brawl vs two young policemen and a bar owner.
I think we’re using different concepts of ‘dominance’ here. I usually think of ‘dominance’ as a social relationship between a strong party and a submissive party, a hierarchy. A relationship between a ruler and the ruled, or an abuser and abused. I don’t think that a human driving a bulldozer which destroys an anthill without the human even noticing that the anthill existed is the same sort of relationship. I think we need some word other than ‘dominant’ to describe the human wiping out the ants in an instant without sparing them a thought. It doesn’t particularly seem like a conflict even. The human in a bulldozer didn’t perceive themselves to be in a conflict, the ants weren’t powerful enough to register as an opponent or obstacle at all.
Thinking a bit more about this, I might group types of power into:
Power through relating: Social/economic/government/negotiating/threatening, reshaping the social world and the behavior of others
Power through understanding: having intellect and knowledge affordances, being able to solve clever puzzles in the world to achieve aims
Power through control: having physical affordances that allow for taking potent actions, reshaping the physical world
They all bleed together at the edges and are somewhat fungible in various ways, but I think it makes sense to talk of clusters despite their fuzzy edges.
Human psychology, mainly. “Dominance”-in-the-human-intuitive-sense was in the original post mainly because I think that’s how most humans intuitively understand “power”, despite (I claimed) not being particularly natural for more-powerful agents. So I’d expect humans to be confused insofar as they try to apply those dominance-in-the-human-intuitive-sense intuitions to more powerful agents.
And like, sure, one could use a notion of “dominance” which is general enough to encompass all forms of conflict, but at that point we can just talk about “conflict” and the like without the word “dominance”; using the word “dominance” for that is unnecessarily confusing, because most humans’ intuitive notion of “dominance” is narrower.
The post seems to me to be about notions of power, and the affordances of intelligent agents. I think this is a relevant kind of power to keep in mind.
Except for the child and the blacksmith, all of these seem like dominance conflicts to me. The blacksmith plausibly becomes a dominance conflict too once you consider how he ended up with the resources and what tasks he’s likely to face. You contrast these with conflicts between human groups, but I’d compare to e.g. a conflict between a drunk middle-aged loner who is looking for a brawl vs two young policemen and a bar owner.
I think we’re using different concepts of ‘dominance’ here. I usually think of ‘dominance’ as a social relationship between a strong party and a submissive party, a hierarchy. A relationship between a ruler and the ruled, or an abuser and abused. I don’t think that a human driving a bulldozer which destroys an anthill without the human even noticing that the anthill existed is the same sort of relationship. I think we need some word other than ‘dominant’ to describe the human wiping out the ants in an instant without sparing them a thought. It doesn’t particularly seem like a conflict even. The human in a bulldozer didn’t perceive themselves to be in a conflict, the ants weren’t powerful enough to register as an opponent or obstacle at all.
What phenomenon are you modelling where this distinction is relevant?
Thinking a bit more about this, I might group types of power into:
Power through relating: Social/economic/government/negotiating/threatening, reshaping the social world and the behavior of others
Power through understanding: having intellect and knowledge affordances, being able to solve clever puzzles in the world to achieve aims
Power through control: having physical affordances that allow for taking potent actions, reshaping the physical world
They all bleed together at the edges and are somewhat fungible in various ways, but I think it makes sense to talk of clusters despite their fuzzy edges.
Human psychology, mainly. “Dominance”-in-the-human-intuitive-sense was in the original post mainly because I think that’s how most humans intuitively understand “power”, despite (I claimed) not being particularly natural for more-powerful agents. So I’d expect humans to be confused insofar as they try to apply those dominance-in-the-human-intuitive-sense intuitions to more powerful agents.
And like, sure, one could use a notion of “dominance” which is general enough to encompass all forms of conflict, but at that point we can just talk about “conflict” and the like without the word “dominance”; using the word “dominance” for that is unnecessarily confusing, because most humans’ intuitive notion of “dominance” is narrower.
Ah. I would say human psychology is too epiphenomenal so I’m mainly modelling things that shape (dis)equillibria in complex ecologies.
The post seems to me to be about notions of power, and the affordances of intelligent agents. I think this is a relevant kind of power to keep in mind.