JamesAndrix comments on Pract: A Guessing and Testing Game - Less Wrong

5 Post author: brian_jaress 31 July 2009 09:13AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 31 July 2009 05:29:05PM 4 points [-]

The game is broken, not cousin_it.

If I was your opponent, I would assume letting me make many wrong guesses while you only defined sequences was due to your extremely long set definition

From which we can infer that you already know how to win yourself. I can conclude that your decision to still play the game is an insult to your opponent.

But more importantly, why would you bother playing at all?

If handicapping is necessary it should be built into the rules (or the odds). Otherwise the game becomes one in which the object is to pay lip service to 'playing in the spirit of the game' while actually getting as close to the 'PGP encryption' ideal as one can without being unduly stigmatised. If you want your attention to be dominated by that crap stop playing games of reason and go socialise.

Comment author: JamesAndrix 31 July 2009 06:26:53PM 1 point [-]

If you have no payoff for winning, then why call it winning in the 'rationalists win' sense?

It seems that here the only payoff is in learning and so you should value an opponent that will set a task appropriate to your skill. To cooperate you should try to be that kind of opponent.

The point system might declare winners in a silly way, but why care about the points?

Comment author: orthonormal 31 July 2009 07:01:38PM 2 points [-]

The point system might declare winners in a silly way, but why care about the points?

I would expect that one reason we gravitate toward competitive games, especially those with points, is that we can't help but treat them as signals of status. I'd in fact expect that if you ran a psych experiment with subjects playing a game, and the experimenters instructed them to play in one fashion but meaningless points were awarded under a different criterion, that people would be dramatically swayed by the point system (and possibly unaware of this fact).