Comperation or coopetition? Que?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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This post has been written after reading the article timworstall.com/2014/02/20/m … /#comments . The article is an attempt to ‘find’ that the business world is based more on cooperation than competition.

The cited article talks of businesses “competing to find someone to cooperate with”? This is the kind of muddled and warped place only unbridled reason can get you into……

NO. You are EITHER competitive or you are cooperative but you cannot be both, cannot turn from one to the other at the drop of a hat, no more than you can put coal in a diesel engine and get it to work, or diesel in a coal engine!

To quote the article: “The competition is to try and find the people that you can cooperate with.” To be specific, this refers to the process by which a large company will chose a supplier of components, which it does not make itself, but which it needs to complete its products. Once a supplier has been chosen then the two companies work together to their mutual benefit.

This is called cooperation in the article (and outside it often enough). It is not. It is using other people in order to gain a competitive advantage …. quite a different matter.

When countries form alliances, NATO for example, they are NOT cooperating. They are using each other to gain competitive advantages.

Competitive people are motivated ONLY by competition. They are INCAPABLE of cooperating. Look below the surface of anything they do, anything that might APPEAR to be cooperative, and you will find competition at work.

One sure giveaway that there is no cooperation in our society is the difficulty people have in doing things which animals, which ARE cooperative, find trivially easy.

Marching soldiers can never match flocks of birds or shoals of fishes in performing synchronised movements, and that is because marching soldiers are motivated by competition and are probably all competing to have the best shine on their buttons or shoes, or to move with the greatest precision. Birds and fishes, on the other hand, are cooperative. That means that they pay attention to, GIVE THEIR TOTAL UNDIVIDED ATTENTION TO, all the other birds or fishes around them and to what they are doing, and they thus become very expert at anticipating and responding to what their neighbour is doing.

In other words, birds and fishes (and all other animals) are expert communicators. These huge flocks of birds and fishes are capable of those spectacular feats of synchronised flying or swimming because they communicate so expertly that, to people who are used to the very poor levels of communication achievable by competitive people, it seems there must be something mysterious going on, something not far short of telepathy…… I imagine that scientists might be exploring the idea of electromagnetic fields as the solution to the conundrum.

So, marching soldiers are inferior in ability to animals BECAUSE of competition. Further, their poor performance is down to poor communication skills. Indeed, their communication skills are so low that they have to be TRAINED to do something that a cooperative person would do easily and with no need of training.

And this one giveaway that competition is at work: cooperative people develop superb communication skills while competitive people develop very poor communication skills. In fact, competitiveness tends to degrade whatever communication skills are there already.

It is difficult to imagine any activity that people do that does not involve communication skills, one way or another. Most people subscribe to the idea that competition leads to excellence, but the loss of communication skills is so damaging and so fundamental that it is impossible to subscribe to such a notion.

In fact, the loss of communication skills is the beginnings if autism. The prevalence of autism in our society is due to the fact that it is based on competition.

Thus, since our society is based on competition it does not breed excellence, quite the opposite, and nor does it ever support cooperative endeavours.

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Groups of people cooperate in order to succeed in a competition against other groups all the time. This idea that there are ‘competitive people’ who are ‘incapable of cooperating’ is first of all, demonstrably false by pretty much the entirety of human experience, it’s also an attempt to paint people as sub-human villains to draw philosophical conclusions from the caricature. Sometimes you can get away with this, but not when the charicature is so clearly make believe.

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It is an attempt to understand humanity and where its problems stem from, without which understanding improving our society in any significant way will be impossible. Subhuman villians? No. Just a population that has succumbed to an addiction to power — which turns things around and has me in the position of tsaking a far, far more positive view of human nature and human potential than you are likely to find anywhere else.

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An ‘attempt at understanding’ would have more question marks, one would think.

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I would think that cooperation and competition would both be the case. I mean, in order to compete you have to play the game, and in order to play th game you have to cooperate. I see a lof of this either/or kind of thinking going on. It’s usually incorrect.

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In order to compete, yes, you have to play the same game, but cooperation has nothing to do with it. You cheat, you bend or rewrite the rules without notice — to use cooperation in this way is to corrupt the concept.

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Corrupt the concept?

I just don’t think it’s an either/or. I see people cooperating and competing in varying degrees, at the same time all the time. You don’t see that?

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From where are you getting the idea that people who compete necessarily do it in that way? This just seems like baseless vitriol to me.

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No, that’s not how it works. You are seeing the actions, where it is the INTENTION that is important. If your INTENTION is to compete you can still look like you are cooperating, but you are actually being competitive.

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Look at the world we live in. Look at what even science and philosophy have to say about competing. Use your eyes and ears. Think about it: if your life is about winning, then you MUST win at any cost. The alternative is death. I don’t necessarily mean physical death, but withdraw a person’s motivation and they die psychologically.

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I think you’re artificially splitting up reality into a false dichotomy in order to flatter your preconceived notions.

It’s pretty simple. People cooperate by playing a game, they compete in order to win the game. The cooperation and the competition happen at the same time. I don’t see what’s conceptually difficult about that.

Check out section 1.1 of this article with special attention to the part about tacit agreements.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/convention/

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I don’t need to read what any scientists have to say. Scientists have got it wrong. Science is much too superficial.

Strange as it may seem to those people who think that humanity is making progress, that science is superior to religion, many religions, Islam and Judaism/Christianity among them, have recognised that the intention is more important than the action. Thus in the Quran believers are admonished to “judge an action by its intention”, and the same may be found in the bible. I would be surprised if Hinduism and Buddhism and the like did not have something similar. It is only in our degenerate time where people have lost the ability to comprehend anything other than the entirely superficial, that we have descended to judging actions purely as actions in the absence of any deeper insights.

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This horse has been lead to the water, as far as I’m concerned.

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Good point Ucc. I’ll leave him to wallow in his own ignorance now.

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So, against my better judgement, since I’ve been here time and again, I weakened and had a look at the article. Sigh. Same old notes again. Why did I bother? Why do I let you idiots goad me into acting against my better judgement, against all my experience? How many times do I have to try and explain to you — I mean how difficult is it to grasp that there actually are other ways besides philosophy and science, besides reason logic and experiment? And how difficult can it be to grasp that if you use other methods of thinking and getting to the truth than those used by philosophy, then you do not argue by the methods of philosophy and cannot be challenged on philosophical grounds. You appear to have utter faith in reason. That is your weakness and your prison. You will never get to the truth, as philosophers have long recognized and noted, by the methods of philosophy. Why, then, persist in maintaining that philosophy is the way, that philosophy is king, that philosophy is the only and rightful ruler? — this smacks of religious fervor.

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It's obvious there are other ways besides philosophy and science. For example, you can say whatever the hell pops into your head without giving it any thought whatsoever.  You can compose emotional appeals that don't make any rational sense in an attempt to denigrate organizations, attitudes, and systems that you have a bone to pick with.   There are many ways.  But you can expect that some of them will be criticized.

What’s the name of this website, dragon?

You are saying things that seem obviously false to the people reading them. We’re pointing out that it’s obviously false that people who compete can’t cooperate- it’s not ‘philosophy’ to simply observe that what you’re saying is the opposite of what we all experience every day. You are rejecting these critcisms on the grounds that you (apparently) aren’t using philosophy, and that therefore (why?) other people can’t use philosophy to criticize you. Well, what sort of discussion are you after then? If I disagree with you, what way are you giving me permission to express it? Poetry? A funny picture of a cat? Insults? if not philosophy, reason, logic, and science, what?

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This, this thing right here is what you are doing dragon.

Superficial how? It does it’s best, is based on the limited perceptions of humans and can you ever say more about whatever measurement you are attempting, except that, you’ve probably saved far less lives than science and scientists. Probably killed far less also…

I do not follow any religion, including Scientism. I know science is as much a human attempt to understand the world we live in as any religion, and am usually among the first to point out it’s flaws. But that does not mean I don’t need to read them. I read them as often as I can, in much the same way as I read a religious philosophy, with an attempt to understand.

Intention is important, but it is not more important than action. If I intend to free my slaves, but never do, it counts for less. If I intend to find a steroid to enhance sports players, but it is found to help those recovering from surgery, does it cause my result to be less important for the world? Intent is often a feeling, and is important for motivation, but it is the results that matters to anyone else except the person intending and feeling. You many feel good about getting a body part cut off, but I won’t feel the same. But our feelings and intents are equal. So, it is the result that matters, because intent is like the wind fluid and mostly compressible into solid after a lot of pressure and cold.

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You are trying to scorn me to death, but strange to say poetry — yes, actually; if you actually had any inkling of how the world/mind really works you would understand poetry and you would know that it gets to truths that are much too deep to be reached by science. Furthermore, these truths would also enlighten you as to the true nature of science and philosophy. Picture of a cat? Insults? — if only you knew what you were saying, if only you knew how visual and creative the mind really is, and how little it and the world values or works according to rules. Science is governed by rules. Neither the world nor the the mind are so confined. If you only knew how much science’s aggressive interrogations of the world actually affected the very world it is trying to describe, and supposedly with detachment and objectivity.

People on this site keep asking “what else is there” if not science and philosophy. I’ve answered that question too many times already and it does no good whatsoever. The minds of scientists and philosophers are too locked into their ruley ways.

And the title of this forum? Yes I do know it, but you see, I do not subscribe to the idea that only officionados of the subject of any site can usefully or enjoyably participate in what is going on in that site. In fact, my preference is to participate in sites that believe in things that I don’t. It’s like I always like going places I haven’t been to before. It’s what makes life rich and interesting.

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It's one thing to come to a philosophy site and state your case despite no interest in philosophy.   It's another thing to come to a philosophy site and declare the the people there who are interested in philosophy aren't allowed to use philosophy to evaluate your positions.

And anyway, the observation that there is no hard break between cooperative people and competitive people isn’t a result of some disputed philosophical process. It’s just an obvious and casual observation. It’s hard to believe you think observation isn’t allowed to be used to criticize your points.

 People who are cooperative also compete.  People who compete use cooperation to be more successful at it.  That's all.  If you'll only accept this fact presented in a particular style, that isn't my problem, it's you putting an artificial limit on your own learning.
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Firstly, it’s not that I won’t allow philosophy to be used — this misrepresents what has been going on. What is happening is that I get criticised on the basis of philosophy and it is REPEATEDLY DEMANDED that I should reply in terms of philosophy. It is the reply that I refuse to make, and I refuse to make it on the clearly stated basis that the ideas I express are derived outside the world of philosophy and are, usually, inaccessible to philosophy.

I do alloow observations. I very much allow observations. I rely very much on observations myself. The problem is in the interpretation: again, inevitably, members of this site approach observations with minds steeped in philosophy and they make the interpretations in that light. I disagree with the interpretations — your next point being a good example: you interpret some things you see as cooperation. I interpret the same observed phenomena as competition. E.g. you interpret a football team as being cooperative. I do not. There are countless other examples. In every case when you see cooperation, I see competition.

I will just add that explanation again: it is not sufficient to judge behaviour on appearances. You HAVE to look deeper. Have you never experiences someone who BEHAVES as if they were your friend but you know damned well that they are doing you the dirty behind your back? You maybe only know this because you have heard from other people that they have been telling false stories about you. The point is, though, that to all APPEARANCE they are a friend while underneath they are really an enemy. The intention of the friendly behaviour is to lull you into a false sense of security. As I keep saying: it’s intention that matters.