International systems are more organic than designed, but the problem with cooperation is that it's not a particularly stable arrangement without enforcement - sure, everybody is better off when everybody cooperates, but you can be even better off when you don't cooperate but everybody else does.

I'm not certain of the balance myself. I was thinking as a counterpoint of the band The Beatles where the two song writers (McCartney and Lennon) are seen in competition. There is a balance there between their competitiveness as song writers and their cooperation in the band.

I think it is one-sided to see any situation where we want to retain balance as being significantly affected by one of the sides exclusively. If one believes that there is a balance to be maintained between cooperation and competition, I don't immediately default to believing that any perceived imbalance is due to one and not the other.

> We need more systems based on cooperation instead of competition.

That requires dissolving the anarchy of the international system. Which requires an enforcer.

Isn't this the opposite? If you want competition then you need something like the WTO as a mechanism to prevent countries from putting up trade barriers etc.

If some countries want to collaborate on some CERN project they just... do that.

> If you want competition then you need something like the WTO as a mechanism to prevent countries from putting up trade barriers etc.

That's an enforcer. Unfortunately, nobody follows through with its sanctions, so it's devolved into a glorified opinion-providing body.

> If some countries want to collaborate on some CERN project they just... do that

CERN is about doing thing, not not doing things. You can't CERN your way to nuclear non-proliferation.

> That's an enforcer. Unfortunately, nobody follows through with its sanctions, so it's devolved into a glorified opinion-providing body.

The mechanism in principle is pretty simple and largely works: You both agree not to tariff each other's exports and various other conditions and then if one of you breaks the deal the other one doesn't have to follow through on their end either, and maybe some extra leverage from being a multi-party organization because Country A breaking their deal with Country B means Country C can also apply sanctions to Country A.

Obviously it doesn't work if you don't actually do it.

> You can't CERN your way to nuclear non-proliferation.

But that's also not about cooperation. The US has nuclear weapons and they don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. What is Iran getting out of this? Cooperation is working together toward a common goal. "Don't do this thing it's otherwise in your interest to do" is either a bribe or a threat.

The closest you get to not doing something being cooperative would be something like, an agreement not to do gain of function research. But that's a judgement call about a tradeoff. If you do the research and it escapes from the lab you get a pandemic; if you don't do the research then you don't have the science when there is a natural pandemic. If countries agree that the tradeoff isn't worth it then you don't need an enforcement mechanism, they just refrain from doing it. If they don't agree, how do you even determine who is right? Or, if you somehow answer that question, you're back to the non-cooperative case where one country is forcing its will on another instead.

> You can't CERN your way to nuclear non-proliferation.

Non-proliferation is, the US has nuclear weapons and doesn't want Iran to have them, so is going to apply some kind of bribe or threat. It's not cooperative.

The better example here is climate change. Everyone has a direct individual benefit from burning carbon but it's to our collective detriment, so how do you get anyone to stop, especially the countries with large oil and coal reserves?

In theory you could punish countries that don't stop burning carbon, but that appears to be hard and in practice what's doing the most good is making solar cheaper than burning coal and making electric cars people actually want, politics of infamous electric car man notwithstanding.

So what does that look like for making AI "safe, secure and trustworthy"? Maybe something like publishing state of the art models for free with full documentation of how they were created, so that people aren't sending their sensitive data to questionable third parties who do who knows what with it or using models with secret biases.

> Unfortunately, nobody follows through with its sanctions, so it's devolved into a glorified opinion-providing body.

That's a little misleading. What actually happened is summarized here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body

Since 2019, when the Donald Trump administration blocked appointments to the body, the Appellate Body has been unable to enforce WTO rules and punish violators of WTO rules. Subsequently, disregard for trade rules has increased, leading to more trade protectionist measures. The Joe Biden administration has maintained Trump's freeze on new appointments.

I’d nominate either the AGI people keep telling me is “right around the corner”, or the NHI that seem to keep popping up around nuclear installations.

Clearly humans aren’t able to do this task.

Competition is as old as time. There are single celled organisms on your skin right now competing for resources to live. There is nothing more innate to life than this.

Cooperation is as old as time. There are single celled organisms living symbiotically on your skin right now.

The mitochondria in my cells are also symbiotes but thats just because whatever ancestor ate then found they were hard to digest.

The naturalistic fallacy is still a fallacy.

The bacteria that are most related to mithocondria are intracelular parasits, so they were probably not eaten while roaming arround pacefully, they are probably nasty parasits that got lazy.

But humans aren't living in the "untamed wilds". We figured out that it's possible to cooperate, even in large numbers, in many-thousands-of-years-BC. Since then we're been scaling up the level of cooperation. The last century provides many examples of successful cooperation between even states -- e.g. various nuclear test ban treaties. Why pretend that now of all times it's somehow impossible for us to cooperate?