Talk:Common preference

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Hmmm... this would appear to be identical to the "Win-Win solution" concept, which was developed centuries ago, and has recently (ie. in the last 15 years) been popularised quite heavily by Steven Covey of the 7 Habits of Successful People series of books, and many others. I suspect a separate article on the name of Win-Win would be more appropriate. This article seems to use an alternate term from a specific organisation, which is probably not the best approach. - MMGB

I agree with this, and basically, I'm not sure that Wikipedia is going to want to have articles on the minor jargon of every minor movement. So, what should we do with this article? Probably redirect to win-win situation. Other ideas? --LMS

When you invent new terms for old ideas, it's easier to gloss over the flaws and omissions of the old idea, and easier to take credit for inventing it. It is true, and has been known for years as you point out, that life is a non-zero sum game in general, and that many situations that are perceived as "conflicts" are really misunderstandings. This is nothing new. But the text here implies something very different, which is the idea that zero-sum games don't exist, which is simply false. Even though most conflicts are misunderstandings, some aren't: a conflict about who owns or gets to control a single physical resource, for example, when two people have directly conflicting goals for that resource, is in fact a zero-sum game, and no amount of liberal mush-head handwaving will change that fact. Not all such conflicts imply the zero-sum property for the larger games in which they are embedded, though, and this too is an old idea. Business, for example, is a hugely positive-sum game, and most business deals benefit everyone involved, even though most deals involve moving around zero-sum physical resources--because the subjective value of resources is often not the same from one person to the next. But poker, as another example, is a zero-sum game; you win only and exactly what the other guy loses, and the unit of measure is exactly the same for both parties. --LDC

[edit] VfD

This article was listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion Apr 20 to Apr 26 2004. Consensus was not reached. Turned into a disambig page at discretion of admin. Discussion:

From Cleanup: Common preference, legitimate?

  • Delete. The term as it's defined in the article would be meaningful but not useful, since there's no particular reason why such a preference should exist in a randomly chosen situation. I've never heard anyone use it. My guess is that it's a term only used by the Taking Children Seriously movement. The real question would then become whether TCS warrants an article about themselves and a separate article about one of their concepts. Isomorphic 02:43, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • Merge. It is not terribly npov either btw. Sander123 13:51, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • As a parent of young children, I consider the TCS movement pseudo-scientific psycho-babble (an emergent philosophy?) that might work in a few lucky families but fails under all too many common scenarios. But we keep many psycho-babble articles and theirs is no worse than others. However, the term "common preference" is a trivial neologism that 1) is unique to TCS (at least by all evidence I can find) and 2) is already adequately defined in the TCS article. I will also argue that "common preference" is, in context, functionally identical to non-zero-sum, though some might disagree. Delete Common preference. Rossami 19:50, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • Merge with Taking Children Seriously and make common preference a disambiguation with pointers to Taking Children Seriously and non-zero-sum . "Common preference" has been used in at least one economics paper [1] and I suspect there are more. Wile E. Heresiarch 15:55, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

End discussion