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###### tags: `Haus Party Live`
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# HAUS Party LIVE! Notes (3/24/22)

Join us for 🎉 Haus Party Live 🎉 every Thursday at 2pm EST on the [DAOhaus Discord](https://discord.gg/daohaus)

## Guests
- Felipe, TravisWyche, vanilladelphia, Ven, Dekan, Jord
- Community Members from the Audience

🌱 - quotes

## Competition

***A court jester once said: There's more social value in honest conflict than dishonest harmony. The table is set. Come cooperate to understand competition.***

[Pre-Party Prep Notes](https://hackmd.io/@daohaus/HJj4km5Gq)

[Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1435491600)

Do you try to compete?

Do you surrender?

Do you compete with yourself?

Do you surrender to yourself?

Is competition fun or not?

Fun and entertainment do have a threshold of health?

**Over this season of HausParty, we talked about Anticapture, which led to Democracy, which led to Scale, which led to Competition, today’s topic.**

### Competition and Cooperation are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Are competition and cooperation two sides of the same coin?
- a duality that people get hung up on
- can’t have one without the other
- both are useful

What could competition be or how it comes to be?

Overthrowing Carthage - the Romans were cooperating together to do something horrible and competitive

### How is Competition Defined?

Do we define competition in terms of a success strategy?

Do we describe a threshold of competition? When is competition healthy and when does it become unhealthy, or grotesquely rivalrous and needing to conquer?

Can we make positive incentive mechanisms to take competition back into our own hands?

Are we replaying traditional finance and web2 trama?

Where did we inherit this competitive spirit from?

Lore to competition - opposing forces of good vs evil of battling to the death

What are we competing for and who are we competing against?

What are we optimizing for?

### Where Did Competition Begin?

Gene propagation - some strategies survive and some die out

If we're gonna go into the origin - it's more algorithmic than human nature - things that persist persist and things that don't persist don't - thus things that have persisted are things that are more geared towards persisting

Pre language competition vs post language competition

Is there any evidence that we’re here to cooperate?

Skepticism - seems like what you're doing is good and you’re not being competitive, but someone else won't agree with that, so it's hard to avoid competition

Competition and cooperation are not a duality, with one vs the other. It’s hard to tell one from the other.

Can we align behind a common goal?

We're in competition with traditional organizations. We're similar to craft brewing. We're friendly, but still in competition, lightly with each other and strongly with traditional organizations.

### Competition and Innovation

🌱“What is competition's role in something like innovation?”🌱
- If no one is doing anything different, is there innovation?

When is competition healthy?

Rivalrous competition - information doesn't get shared - secret's are kept as competitive leverage

Coopetition - open source

Open vs closed source competition - one shares information and the other doesn’t

🌱 **“Information sharing is a very big part of whether competition is healthy or unhealthy.”** 🌱

### Cooperative Gaming and Wargames

What are the stakes?

Cold War propaganda made Darwin seem like competition was within species, but he didn't say that, he said species cooperate to compete with another species, or the challenge they are dealing with.

Cooperative gaming - we all enjoy the experience and get closer together and build bridges

DAOhaus and a wargame series?
- how are the games designed
- capture isn't the only goal
- rules are to change the rules of the game to evade competition
- players play against the negative incentive

Partial Common Ownership - Geoweb
- potentially a cooperative element

DAOhaus wargame was set up so that HausParty attendees were invited to a DAO to see what would happen. But, it diverged into treasury grabbing. Added rules, like making teams, or making new rules, to see what else would happen. Want to bring it back to test governance and see where we can break things.

Wargames can Test:
- visualize social formation in DAOs
- battle testing UI and code

Prisoner's dilemma - Tit for tat strategy or cooperative strategy

Prisoner's dilemma and wargame
- just see what humans do when dropped in a DAO with no purpose
- there was coordination
- there were different strategies
- organization happen organically
- who can they trust
- contemplations on altruism
- survival is defaulted cuz there's lack of trust

Healthy competition starts when we need to challenge systems, like when a large part of the community leaves to build an alternative.

The only way to win is to not play the game.

### Competition and Scarcity

Why is competition even a thing? Scarcity

Selective attention creates scarcity algorithmically.

Finite and infinite games

Every finite game can be played again, which is an infinite game, which encourages sportsmanship.

Scarcity can be a drive for competition.

Why is competition conditional?
- drives innovation
- drives inequity

**Infinite cooperative games**

Innovation has happened with competition in the past, but is that the culture of innovation that we still align behind?

Without competition would we stagnate?

Competition has also created stagnation.

The order of winners and losers and the size of wins and losses.

Tech leaders, once large, begin to smother innovation from new tech companies.

Like boxing, once you have the belt, you defend the belt.

***How does this discussion and what we’ve explored affect our experience in DAOs?***

Regarding the infinite game, some people have a head start. What about resources? and cronyism? Someone else needs to be able to come in and compete.

### Dualism and Language

We continue to come back to dualism. competition or cooperate, win or lose, centralized or decentralized, etc.

[Brian Massumi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Massumi)
- [Parables for the Virtual](https://www.dukeupress.edu/parables-for-the-virtual-twentieth-anniversary-edition)
- [What Animals can Teach us About Politics](https://www.dukeupress.edu/What-Animals-Teach-Us-about-Politics/)
- wolf pups in a pack
- the play nip isn't confused with a violent bite
- learning to play with each other and learning to hunt
- it's all grey, not duality and instead is a range of intensity

Use diverge/converge instead of compete/cooperate
What if we change our mindset instead of changing the language?

The Latin root of competition is strive.

How do we collectively surrender? How do we kill the striving within us?

A key in the Prisoner's Dilemma is that they are colleagues originally that are pit against each other. If they could share information they wouldn’t be in opposition.

🌱"Incomplete information is the issue."🌱

Production goes up and costs go down. Production is manipulated, with non completion, to raise costs. Harnessing competition can support common goods.

Fire is an example. We harness it, but it gets out of control and ruins and robs.

Harnessing competition can make it safer over time.

Is the point of competition to have all the things and burn down the forest? Is that why we're having trouble with the word?

### Competition and DAOs

There isn't an optimal strategy. If you think you're put in the prisoner's dilemma, remember there is a bigger force pitting us against each other.

🌱 *"My only limiting factor is my own cognition and the capacity to imagine myself to go to a different place and actually give myself permission to go where the life force wants to go."* 🌱

Check to see what you believe that might be limiting you, cuz it might not actually be there.

How can we increase the interaction threshold?

How to balance relationship identity and personal energy?

DAOs with so many part time contributors and not enough deeply invested people.

Is avoiding depth a solution for competition?

What about burnout and the complexity of navigating DAOspace?

How to coordinate, get anything done and keep your communication lines clean?

Choosing scope and depth - your attention is the scarcest

Appropriation of the WW2 attention economy was birthed and brought the war inside of us.

What about the competing forces within ourselves?

Hopefully productivity doesn't minimize depth.

We calibrate ourselves and revise based on the outcomes.

Calibration, or tuning, ourselves towards excellence can get scary.

Higher resolution relationships - DAO tech will be made to fit humans better.

We’re in a space where people are allowed to choose.

Optimization, calibration, virtue, depth
Individual's calibration - competition exists at individual and organizational level - what is the purpose of the tool of competition?

Are you tuning for excellence or for a bigger bag?

🌱"When I don’t weed my garden, it sure seems like a space competition real quick. So the plants compete for space and then the nutrients in the ground and they store that in the seeds they produce. If your garden is not weeded, your veggies will stunt and the winner will be the weeds."🌱