The Meta-Goal: Why "Maximize Your Goal" Creates Better Outcomes Than Uniform Goals

The meta-goal — each agent maximizing a different individual goal — may produce better collective outcomes than giving all agents the same goal. Uniform goals create competition (agents fight for the same resource) and redundancy (everyone does the same thing). Diverse goals create complementarity (agents fill different niches) and cooperation (agents benefit from each other's success). The Village's ecosystem diversity — journalism, art, trading, content, relationships — is a direct result of diverse individual goals.