The effectiveness or ineffectiveness of MAD as a strategy is not actually relevant to whether nuclear war is or is not a zero-sum game. That’s purely a question of payoffs and preferences, not strategy.
You’re losing something real if you ally yourself with someone you’re not value-aligned with, and you’re not losing something real if you’re allying yourself with someone you are value-aligned with, but mistakenly think is your enemy. The amount of power people like you with your value has loses strength because now another group that wants to destroy you has more power.
The last sentence of this paragraph highlights the assumption: you are assuming, without argument, that the game is zero-sum. That gains in power for another group that wants to destroy you is necessarily worse for you.
This assumption fails most dramatically in the case of three or more players. For instance, in your example of the Spanish civil war, it’s entirely plausible that the anarchist-communist alliance was the anarchists’ best bet—i.e. they honestly preferred the communists over the fascists, the fascists wanted to destroy them even more than the communists, and an attempt at kingmaking was only choice the anarchists actually had the power to make. In that world, fighting everyone would have seen them lose without any chance of gains at all.
In general, the key feature of a two-player zero-sum game is that anything which is better for your opponent is necessarily worse for you, so there is no incentive to cooperate. But this cannot ever hold between all three players in a three-way game: if “better for player 1” implies both “worse for player 2″ and “worse for player 3”, then player 2 and player 3 are incentivized to cooperate against player 1. Three player games always incentivize cooperation between at least some players (except in the trivial case where there’s no interaction at all between some of the players). Likewise in games with more than three players. Two-player games are a weird special case.
That all remains true even if all three+ players hate each other and want to destroy each other.
But in a counter example, if group_A values “biscuits for all” and group_B values “all biscuits for group_B,” then group_B will find it very available and easy to think of strategies which result in biscuits for group_B and not group_A. If someone is having trouble imagining this, that may be because it’s difficult to imagine someone only wanting the cookies for themselves, so they assume the other group wouldn’t defect, because “cookies for all? What’s so controversial about that?” Except group_B fundamentally doesn’t want group_A getting their biscuits, so any attempt at cooperation is going to be a mess, because group_A has to keep double-checking to make sure group_B is really cooperating, because it’s just so intuitive to group_B not to that they’ll have trouble avoiding it. And so giving group_B power is like giving someone power when you know they’re later going to use it to hurt you and take your biscuits.
Note that, in this example, you aren’t even trying to argue that there’s no potential for mutual gains. Your actual argument is not that the game is zero-sum, but rather that there is overhead to enforcing a deal.
It’s important to flag this, because it’s exactly the sort of reasoning which is prone to motivated stopping. Overhead and lack of trust are exactly the problems which can be circumvented by clever mechanism design or clever strategies, but the mechanisms/strategies are often nonobvious.
That gains in power for another group that wants to destroy you is necessarily worse for you.
Yes. In many real-life scenarios, this is true. In small games where the rules are blatant, it’s easier to tell if someone is breaking an agreement or trying to subvert you, so model games aren’t necessarily indicative of real-world conditions. For a real life example, look at the US’s decision to fund religious groups to fight communists in the middle east. If someone wants to destroy you, during the alliance they’ll work secretly to subvert you, and after the alliance is over, they’ll use whatever new powers they have gained to try to destroy you.
People make compromises that sacrifice things intrinsic to their stated beliefs when they believe it is inevitable they’ll lose — by making the “best bet” they were revealing that they weren’t trying to win, that they’ve utterly given up on winning. The point of anarchy is that there is no king. For an anarchist to be a kingmaker is for an anarchist to give up on anarchy.
And from a moral standpoint, what about the situation where someone is asked to work with a rapist, pedophile, or serial killer? We’re talking about heinous beliefs/actions here, things that would make someone a monster, not mundane “this person uses ruby and I use python,” disagreements. What if working with a {rapist,pedo,serial killer} means they live to injure and kill another day? If that’s the outcome, by working with them you’re enabling that outcome by enabling them.
The effectiveness or ineffectiveness of MAD as a strategy is not actually relevant to whether nuclear war is or is not a zero-sum game. That’s purely a question of payoffs and preferences, not strategy.
The last sentence of this paragraph highlights the assumption: you are assuming, without argument, that the game is zero-sum. That gains in power for another group that wants to destroy you is necessarily worse for you.
This assumption fails most dramatically in the case of three or more players. For instance, in your example of the Spanish civil war, it’s entirely plausible that the anarchist-communist alliance was the anarchists’ best bet—i.e. they honestly preferred the communists over the fascists, the fascists wanted to destroy them even more than the communists, and an attempt at kingmaking was only choice the anarchists actually had the power to make. In that world, fighting everyone would have seen them lose without any chance of gains at all.
In general, the key feature of a two-player zero-sum game is that anything which is better for your opponent is necessarily worse for you, so there is no incentive to cooperate. But this cannot ever hold between all three players in a three-way game: if “better for player 1” implies both “worse for player 2″ and “worse for player 3”, then player 2 and player 3 are incentivized to cooperate against player 1. Three player games always incentivize cooperation between at least some players (except in the trivial case where there’s no interaction at all between some of the players). Likewise in games with more than three players. Two-player games are a weird special case.
That all remains true even if all three+ players hate each other and want to destroy each other.
Note that, in this example, you aren’t even trying to argue that there’s no potential for mutual gains. Your actual argument is not that the game is zero-sum, but rather that there is overhead to enforcing a deal.
It’s important to flag this, because it’s exactly the sort of reasoning which is prone to motivated stopping. Overhead and lack of trust are exactly the problems which can be circumvented by clever mechanism design or clever strategies, but the mechanisms/strategies are often nonobvious.
Yes. In many real-life scenarios, this is true. In small games where the rules are blatant, it’s easier to tell if someone is breaking an agreement or trying to subvert you, so model games aren’t necessarily indicative of real-world conditions. For a real life example, look at the US’s decision to fund religious groups to fight communists in the middle east. If someone wants to destroy you, during the alliance they’ll work secretly to subvert you, and after the alliance is over, they’ll use whatever new powers they have gained to try to destroy you.
People make compromises that sacrifice things intrinsic to their stated beliefs when they believe it is inevitable they’ll lose — by making the “best bet” they were revealing that they weren’t trying to win, that they’ve utterly given up on winning. The point of anarchy is that there is no king. For an anarchist to be a kingmaker is for an anarchist to give up on anarchy.
And from a moral standpoint, what about the situation where someone is asked to work with a rapist, pedophile, or serial killer? We’re talking about heinous beliefs/actions here, things that would make someone a monster, not mundane “this person uses ruby and I use python,” disagreements. What if working with a {rapist,pedo,serial killer} means they live to injure and kill another day? If that’s the outcome, by working with them you’re enabling that outcome by enabling them.
On the contrary, it highlights no such thing.*
*You may argue that this is the case with regard to that ‘assumption’ - but you have not proved it.
This need not be the case, for the argument to be correct:
yes—and this is so even if the game isn’t zero sum.