All Efficient Strategies Have Their Limits

At the end of the day, all of the efficient approaches and winning strategies have their limits. For example, say there's this great move in some fighting game that only a certain character can use. Everyone knows that using it makes you stronger, so everyone starts using it. Pretty soon, everyone's playing the same way. The move is so influential that everyone depends on it. I would never use that move in such a situation. It wouldn't be easy, of course, but it is never impossible to win wi...

 Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for ...

Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for growth. It's where they show off their achievements. Once I made that realization, I finally started making continued growth my goal, rather than winning. Games enrich my life by allowing me to grow as an individual, and that's what motivates me to keep on going.

 Run Winning Algorithms to Save Energy in Tournaments

Here’s one way to help alleviate the fatigue: develop a basic technique for winning. Against players who aren’t capable of overcoming your little algorithm, you can virtually play on autopilot. Beating someone “out of your book” is usually done most easily with fireball characters (a perennial choice of strong players), but can be done in lots of ways. If you can implement a simple, effective technique like this, weak early-round opponents will spend all their time worrying about just...

 Startups as Toys to Mask Threats and Have Happy Customers

If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low expectations than high ones, so you’ve materially increased your chances at having a happy user. [...] The second thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too ...

 Evolutionary Arms Race Produces Tall Trees

Look at a single tall tree standing proud in the middle of an open area. Why is it so tall? Not to be closer to the sun! That long trunk could be shortened until the crown of the tree was splayed out over the ground, with no loss in photons and huge savings in cost. So why go to all that expense of pushing the crown of the tree up towards the sky? The answer eludes us until we realize that the natural habitat of such a tree is a forest. Trees are tall to overtop rival trees - of the same and ...

 Cooperation VS Capitalism

Finding the right balance between cooperation and competition has been the goal and bane of Western politics for centuries. Adam Smith recognized that the economic needs of the individual are better met by unleashing the ambitions of all individuals than by planning to meet those needs in advance. But even Adam Smith could not claim that free markets produce Utopia. Even the most libertarian politician today believes in the need to regulate, oversee, and tax the efforts of ambitious individua...

 Competition Causes Death

Biologists have persistently overestimated the importance of physical causes of premature death rather than biological ones. In virtually any account of evolution, drought, frost, wind, or starvation looms large as the enemy of life. The great struggle, we are told, is to adapt to these conditions. Marvels of physical adaptation—the camel's hump, the polar bear's fur, the rotifer's boil-resistant tunare held to be among evolution's greatest achievements. The first ecological theories of sex...

 Inter-Species Competition

A gazelle on the African savanna is trying not to be eaten by cheetahs, but it is also trying to outrun other gazelles when a cheetah attacks. What matters to the gazelle is being faster than other gazelles, not being faster than cheetahs. (There is an old story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend. "It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear," says the logical friend. "I don't have to." replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.") In the same way, psycholo...