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badger comments on Ace Attorney: pioneer Rationalism-didactic game? - Less Wrong
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Comments (29)
These games seem slightly dangerous from a rationalist perspective, if anything. Despite wearing the attire of evidence, reason, and truth-seeking, what you described is an exercise in motivated cognition. If The Truth is a foregone conclusion, being willing to relinquish particular arguments in favor of it isn't very helpful. Maybe the Miles Edgeworth version is better in this regard.
Any situation where individuals are pitted against one another is going to be difficult training ground for rationality. Evidence needs to be treated not just as something to deploy against others. Reframing truth-seeking as a cooperative, positive-sum venture rather than an adversarial, zero-sum one can go a long way.
That only holds if the individuals are trying to change each other's mind, or prove that the other is wrong to a third party. If the conflict isn't around belief or values, then the involved parties have better use the available evidence to be as effective as possible. So games like Diplomacy or Starcraft could be decent training grounds for instrumental rationality.
(I still agree with what you meant, i.e. adverserial debate isn't very conductive to either party weighting the evidence honestly and updating their beliefs in consequence)
Yes, I should have specified situations where the conflict is over beliefs. Conflicts over goals don't have the same mind-killing quality.
In both cases, the "investigations" game might be better in this regard. Being a Police Procedural, the investigation is a collaboration between a number of investigators. This might be even truer in the upcoming "Phoenix Wright VS Professor Layton" games...
Anyone here familiar with the Professor Layton games? I haven't played them, but I've heard them praised to high heaven and beyond...
first one was okay. second started getting a little tedious.
the trouble is that they can't make the puzzles too difficult for broad appeal.
What I like about the Layton vs Wright crossover is that it is about a witch hunt, a topic that has some very important rationality lessons to impart (see: ST:TnG episode: The Drumhead).
Witch Hunt... this reminds me of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. Anyone here played that game? Does the gameplay mechanic relate to the current topic? I heard something about truths outlined in red or...
Umineko does not have gameplay mechanics; it's not interactive at all. It's a good story, and provides plenty of opportunity for the reader to try to figure out what's going on.
But I would not call Umineko a shining example of ideal epistemology: e.g. the protagonist is investigating a murder mystery; but if in the process he comes to believe in magic, then he loses; and he knows that, so he'll try to avoid a conclusion that involves magic whether or not it's true; and all this occurs in a universe where magic does exist elsewhere, the only question being what happened in this particular mystery.
The "red truths" are a case of filtered evidence: They are statements guaranteed to be literally true (guaranteed both to characters and across the fourth wall), but they are also selected by the villain in order to be optimally misleading.
Sounds interesting. So, we have a clear, enforced case of The Bottom Line, and a some automatically misleading evidence...
No interactivity? You mean you don't even get to choose a route?
No routes. It's a book, with illustrations and music and sound effects, that just happens to be published in software form.