[rudimental]

I appreciate this response. Besides getting out and living life, do you have any good resources for developing the three skills you suggest- distinguishing between short term and long term greedy behavior, how to act selfishly most of the time without appearing selfish, and understanding and practicing game theory?

[foolishdream]

I'm not sure, since this was learned through a series of hard lessons that no one ever taught me or explicitly mentioned. Just keep in mind that many people are not like you, and their value systems can be very different, allowing them to do totally crazy things and backwards rationalize them (see German population during WW2, Steve Jobs, Groupon's Lefkofsky). Eventually you're going to run into low functioning psychopaths. Just try to minimize your losses when it happens.

The other thing to learn with game theory is aligning self interests. When your interests align with other people, your sails are going with the wind, and everything just gets a lot easier. If they aren't, everything is very tough. Try to observe this from an objective viewpoint, if your interactions and results from this person are getting easier or tougher.

I'll need to think on this some more and maybe make a full post about this later.