Workbook Edits for “Making Good Decisions”: Vol. 1 – Part I: Our Shared Humanity, Section#16: Finite and Infinite Games
For new readers, please read the “Pinned Post” titled: Why Use Public Peer-Review to Write a Book? - “See for Yourself”.
For returning readers and subscribers, this post presents the sixteenth section from the workbook for Vol. 1 – Part I: Our Shared Humanity.
· See below the downloadable pdf file for this two-page section, as well as a summary description of the section.
Section#16: Finite and Infinite Games - The last two sections showed that Our Shared Humanity includes the structural presence of “Willful Ignorance”, Error, & Deceit. We can use “Tools”, “Checklists”, and “Processes” to mitigate their impact on decision-making, but we cannot make their presence disappear. This section looks up a level to see a bigger picture. James P. Carse articulates this bigger picture by showing how Hannah Arendt’s “Two-in-One Mind” thinking – the infinite regress of the “self looking at the self” - leads us to the contemplation of an Infinite Game that stands apart from our playing Finite Games. Finite Games seek control to win the Play, thus create their own end. The Infinite Game gives up control to focus on Play, thus has no end. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil comes from placing the winning of Finite Games above playing the Infinite Game. Thus, “Willful Ignorance”, Error & Deceit – the inherent sources of fragility in “Rational” decision-making, averaged evidence, and “Small Worlds” optimization – look like features of the system, instead of bugs in the system, because they keep the good, the bad, and the indifferent “Winners-take-all” from stopping Play. Awakened Ignorance lives with “Willful Ignorance”, Error & Deceit to intervene only when necessary to keep Play from stopping. Our Shared Humanity does not optimize a finite perspective vs. another, it adapts so that a remnant, any remnant, can continue to Play. Making Good Individual, Business, and Investment Decisions means more than “Small Worlds” optimization, it also means learning to win Finite Games while playing the Infinite Game.
Developing…
Note for Readers:
Recently, three separate groups of readers from the Boston area started to meet with me for lunches, drinks or dinners to discuss the material in these posts, and workbooks. This development adds a welcome change to the routine of daily electronic communications, and leads to thoughts that may not have happened in that disembodied format. For instance, the posts have led some readers to read and to talk about their history and genealogy. This triggered the thought that people from our past continue to live in our memories. Doug Hofstadter made a similar point in his 2008 book “I am a Strange Loop”. In his 2014 book, titled “Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology – The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi”, the author quotes William James that “ … our lives consist of those things that we have attended to.” Where do we place our attention – the finite amount of energy that orders information into personal experiences? It feels good to be placing attention in personal meetings.
”CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a business book in three volumes, published serially on Substack for public peer-review. The book connects the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, & continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, & Statistics research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.