Thank you for your kind words, Ross!
I absolutely agree that competition can yield unintended results when the competitors can affect each other. In that case, as you say, a winning strategy can be to make other competitors lose, as opposed to make yourself win. I actually noted this possibility in an early version of the essay, but took it out.
For some investigations, the problem is not so relevant to our present task. For example, if we simulate surrogate societies to identify "fit" organizational structures for humanity, then those simulated societies will not be interacting with each other. Thus, the surrogate societies will only succeed or fail on their ability to to more "honestly" win the competition.
Yet there is another area where the issue you raise could indeed be a problem: sub-civilizations. We can try to find good structures/strategies for humanity by studying countries and smaller subdivisions of civilization. However, we must be sure that whatever "good" structures we find do not only perform well because they push others down, or have other sub-civilizations on which to feed. If we implement such strategies on a global civilization level, they likely won't work, as there are no other global civilizations on which to rely!
It is because of issues like this that I argue we must investigate the functioning of global civilization as a whole, and not solely rely on sub-civilizations. I do hope to take up your challenge and perform these investigations. Thank you for the vote of confidence!