Thanks for these. I'll answer them off-the-cuff, so some of my words won't land. I will at least try to fail gracefully, and be interesting!
("If I had the time, I would have written it shorter")
First, "Why would necessarily there be a win-win condition? Some conflicts are conflicts where there must be a winner and a loser."
The difference, under the current new condition, is simple enough:
Thanks to exponential technology (definition: new attacks out-evolve defenses, at an ever-increasing rate),
"Win/lose " existential outcomes are already obsolete, because they turn into "lose-lose" spirals of Mutually Assured Destruction (nukes, bioweapons, drone swarms, cancellation, currency attacks, Information War...) as more and more players enter the Great Game.
In this increasingly networked hi-tech arms race of ours,
defending gets you whittled down
attacking gets you swarmed under
ignoring gets you trampled over
running away gets you dragged back in
Worse yet, the exponential curve steepens with time.
As stress increases, nerves fray, and the potential for catastrophic compounding of bad decisions increases (remember, expo tech lets more and more players enter the high-stakes game), the geopolitical bar for existential retaliation drops lower and lower.
So flashpoints are everywhere, yes?
And things are accelerating, yes?
None of this is NEW, exactly (see similar precursors to any other geopolitical catastrophes in history), save in two important respects:
1) Social Media network tech lets ALL of us talk to one another both quickly and at scale, giving good solutions an unprecedented chance to spread virally, and
2) Hyper-networked modern life means if we fail, we ALL fall together, hard and far, if only because exponential tech has already ensured that no refuge can be reliably considered to be safe, as in "safely outside the blast radius of an actively imploding global civilization."
So under these conditions, our "win-win" defines itself as "no one is losing hard enough to trigger existential MAD, thereby killing global civilization in the process."
(math comment begins)
This is an astonishingly low bar! But it is useful.Think of it like a negative proof in mathematics: In a negative proof, we seek by logic to eliminate places where the solution CANNOT be, in order to focus our search in the places it CAN.
In this "negative proof" of mine, IF expo tech ensures there can be no "win-lose" solutions that won't devolve/accelerate/spiral into "lose-lose" civilization killers, THEN our only hope is to search the low-bar "win-win" spaces.
Look where you must, start with the lowest bar, and then optimize from there.
(math comment ends)
Now, putting (1) and (2) together,
Suddenly we have BOTH convergent interests emerging, via expo-tech forcing, among all the players at the same time (we all want to thrive and survive), AND a viral means of propagating good solutions should any arise, AND a general idea of where to look!
And this convergence, I think, is new.
Now, to your second point: "Your solution has been around since at least the 19th century as a reason why there won't be any more great wars."
The difference here is trickier to explain. In essence, "knowing where to look" has been a solved problem for a long time, but "finding something useful there" is not.
That's why the big wars keep happening.
I now believe I may have have solved that second problem. But can I translate it in time?
At issue is, (again) in essence, WHY people get sucked into existential "us/them" fights over anything from trivialities to real life-and-death disputes, BUT NOT ALL OF THE TIME.
(This is why my broad definition of decision-making, "the ENTIRE brainspace between inputs & actions," includes not just reason but also experience, expectation, instinct, mood, emotion... Without these missing pieces, the decision-making outputs don't make sense.)
When theory is lacking, people just do what they can.
Since the mechanics of human decision-making are so fuzzy and so maddeningly unpredictable, people everywhere throw up their hands and use whatever predictions are working at the time, hopping (by necessity) from incoherent solution to incoherent solution as the moment dictates.
This was survivable at lower rates of technological change, but it isn't anymore.
We need a strategic upgrade.
Fortunately, the internet has given us an unprecedentedly wide window into those mechanics, as well as the means to talk endlessly about them with each other, WHILE ALSO shattering the iron grip of expertise on the discourse in a way that lets odd little ideas slip in through the cracks.
We have an unprecedented opportunity to understand how humans make our decisions, AND make it viral, AND make it sticky.
So the win-win solution I have in mind works like this: I propose that we
1. Point my Law of Radical Consensus (LoRC) directly at the fuzzy mechanics of human decision-making itself,
2. Extract what universal rules we find there, again using the LoRC for verification,
3. Apply those rules to reveal hidden universalities in how ALL human societies rise and fall,
4. Explore that terrain to discover a way upward,
5. Using guide and pocket-map together, help each other get from here to there, AND
6. Make it viral, and make it sticky.
I have most of the list covered! But setting up a linear line through the tangle is hard.
Hopefully some of this was helpful.
Without the right questions (thanks again), the answers will not appear. Then again, that's why I put these ideas on Social Media. you guys ask good questions.
And the writing practice helps.
(minimal edits, hit send)