This book delves into how humans are intrinsically wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term prosperity, a phenomenon Kristian Rönn terms 'Darwinian demons.' These deeply rooted impulses, a by-product of natural selection, can lead to shortsighted actions that harm others and imperil human survival. Rönn argues that to escape these evolutionary traps, humans must learn to cooperate in new ways and create systems that understand, track, and manage what humankind values most. The book offers a powerful new lens on global problems and invites readers to rethink their priorities for the sake of future generations.
In this book, Steven Pinker presents a detailed argument that violence has significantly decreased over the course of human history. He uses extensive data and statistical analysis to demonstrate this decline in various domains, including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, and the treatment of children, homosexuals, animals, and racial and ethnic minorities. Pinker identifies four key human motivations – empathy, self-control, the moral sense, and reason – as the 'better angels' that have oriented humans away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism. He also discusses historical forces such as the rise of the state (which he terms 'Leviathan'), the spread of commerce, the growth of feminist values, and the expansion of cosmopolitanism, which have contributed to this decline in violence[1][4][5].
How do we escape Moloch’s trap for good?
In this special Burning Man edition of Win-Win, Liv forgoes the usual purple chairs for dusty playa to chat with Kristian Rönn. Kristian is the CEO and co-founder of Normative, a platform for helping industries strive for net zero emissions.
With intellectual roots in Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and his own mission to create positive-sum solutions to climate change, Kristian has just launched a new book - The Darwinian Trap - and in this conversation, Liv and Kristian examine solutions to the short-term thinking and cost externalisation that traditional markets often produce. A conversation full of evolutionary biology, game theory and economics as they examine solutions to the world’s deadliest demon.
Chapters
(01:42)-The Darwinian Trap
(03:42)-Why Is Coordination So Hard?
(07:19)-Unstable Equilibriums: The Butterfly Effect of Game Theory
(13:55)-Natural Selection: Capitalism's Ace In The Hole
(20:16)-How Can A Market Model Anything At All?
(22:10)-Betting On Our Values
(27:29)-What Problems Do Reputational Markets Solve?
(32:56)-Centralized Mechanisms for Overcoming The Darwinian Trap
(35:16)-The Risks of Over-Centralization
(39:46)-The Burning Man Model
(43:00)-Mixed Economies
(45:53)-Killing The Incentives or Kill The Organism?
(50:59)-The Miracle of Evolutionary Success
(54:03)-Finding Hope
(56:21)-Spreading Awareness To Defeat Moloch
(59:58)-Why Burning Man?
Links
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Kristian’s New Book
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Kristian’s Bio
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Liv’s TED talk on Moloch
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Reputational Markets
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Episode Transcript
Credits
♾️ Hosted and Produced by Liv Boeree
♾️ Post-Production by Ryan Kessler
The Win-Win Podcast:
Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, athletes and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose games into Win-Wins.
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Win-Win with Liv Boeree 
