positive-sum

English

Adjective

positive-sum (not comparable)

  1. (game theory) Pertaining to a game or situation where overall benefits to all participants can increase. [from 20th c.]
    Antonym: negative-sum
    Coordinate term: zero-sum
    • 2011, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin, published 2012, page 220:
      Morality […] is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.
    • 2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 2: Entro, Evo, Info”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN:
      The wisdom of crowds can also elevate our moral sentiments. When a wide enough circle of people confer on how best to treat each other, the conversation is bound to go in certain directions. If my starting offer is “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don’t get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind,” I can’t expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there’s no good reason that I should get privileges just because I’m me and you’re not.³² Nor are we likely to agree to the deal “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, and you get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill me and my kind,” despite its symmetry, because the advantages either of us might get in harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits). We’d be wiser to negotiate a social contract that puts us in a positive-sum game: neither gets to harm the other, and both are encouraged to help the other.
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