happened to run this two days in a row, first at my regular meetup and then at a normal board games night. i was expecting it to be a pretty serious workshop exercise for some reason, but it turned out to be very fun!
in the rat meetup people were very aware about the 1/3 chance that the group was trying to deceive them. actually, at some point one person was like "i know you're trying to help me, but i'm going to be dumb and dissent anyways", and then did so.
at the board game night most people seemed to feel like it was very rude to bring collusion up as a possibility, which I was really surprised by - it was like they didn't want to think about it, and it was comparatively much easier to lead them to false conclusions.
i found that fermi estimate questions worked best for this game (allowing reasonable error margins), because it let the collective strategize on how to go in a specific direction (try to get the number too high or too low). and also you get collaborative fermi estimate practice in for free in most rounds :]
i came with a list of pre-generated questions, but we actually found that it was quite fun to tailor the question to the specific lonesome (e.g. we knew that one person was into climbing, so the question we asked was "how many climbing gyms exist in the world". we knew another person knew too many facts about space, so we asked them about ancient history instead). so instead of sending the lonesome away for 3 minutes, we decided on a question first, and then rolled the dice, and then started the timer and began strategizing.
some good questions we used:
- how many climbing gyms exist in the world?
- how many Canadians die to auto accidents every day?
- how many years did it take to build the great pyramids of giza? (this is one where we were trying hard to mislead but accidentally led the lonesome to the right answer lol)
- how many oreos are produced every year?
- how many countries are in the UN?
- when was the first Nobel prize awarded?
a question that was almost good was "what is the chubby bunny world record" - we were unable to find any conclusive information on this on the internet :{
Thank you for the feedback!
I'm delighted it worked for a regular board game meetup. One of my goals with embedding rationalist lessons in games is to make them easy to export out of a rationalist meetup, so I'm glad it's working! I am a little surprised that people didn't want to bring up collusion- I would have expected Werewolf or Blood on the Clocktower or other social deception games to have raised the idea of traitors in ones midst. Wild musing, but I wonder if it's significant that usually in social deception games most of the players are on Team Good, whereas this one if you have people working against you it's the whole room.
It gives me the idea to make the evil, Robbers Cave version of this where you divide the Collective into two groups along some obvious split, and have them roll separately.
I like your questions! I hope you don't mind, I went and added them to the suggested questions list. Tailoring the questions to the Lonesome sounds great and I encourage it, I just can't tailor them in the document :D
. . . when I first read "what is the chubby bunny world record" I thought that would actually be straightforward; Guinness Book Of World Records keeps track of the heaviest rabbit.
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Summary: Take turns being confronted with a group that’s presenting a united front, and grow comfortable agreeing or disagreeing with them.
Tags: Medium, Repeatable
Purpose: Working with groups involves balancing between agreeing with the group consensus when the group is wrong and disagreeing with the group when the group is right. Different people fall prey to each error at different rates, so this activity is designed to practice arriving at the correct answer.
Materials: You need a device that can access wikipedia, and a list of questions with definitive right and wrong answers. A list of possible questions is available here.
Announcement Text: Hello! We’ll be running an activity called Dissent Collusion, which is designed to help grow comfortable with dissenting or assenting to a larger group. Some of us may conform too easily to what others think, while some of us tend to dissent out of a defiant habit. Either way, you should expect some social pressure when it’s your turn, but the purpose is to have a safe place to practice the skill. We hope to see you there!
Description:
Dissent Collusion takes place in rounds, and each round has two teams: The Collective, and The Lonesome. Each round, you’ll go through the following steps:
1. Send someone out of the room or out of earshot.
2. Someone in The Collective will read a question (one that has a definitive answer, like the population of a city) aloud, and roll a six sided die.
3. For all rolls, The Collective will wait three minutes by the clock to discuss how they’ll go about it- and possibly to figure out the right answer themselves, if they didn’t roll a 6.
4. The Lonesome is called back in. They are immediately told the question, but are not shown or told the die roll. They have five minutes by the clock to talk with The Collective and come to an answer.
5. Scoring works as follows:
Over the course of the game, point scores aren’t tracked for any specific Lonesome, but instead track how good all the Lonesomes are at coming to the correct answer and how good each Collective is at guiding Lonesomes.
6. Choose someone new to be the next Lonesome, and start again from step one.
Play can continue for as long as you like. The Schelling time to stop is once everyone present has been the Lonesome the same number of times. In general, people can join or leave easily between rounds.
Variations: The Robber's Cave Variant starts by splitting The Collective into two groups, divided roughly evenly. The division of the groups is public knowledge and stable; use the same teams throughout the evening. (Lonesomes are, as always, on their own team.) Call the groups Strange and Charm. Each group rolls separately, keeps their roll secret, and scores points separately. They score points the same way The Collective does.
There's a potential flaw here in that Lonesomes can agree with the team they were on, trying to give "their" team points even if means being mislead. A fix for that is to have the teams be constantly changing, perhaps always having the Lonesome swap teams after they go or sorting the teams by who is to the left or right of the Lonesome. The point of keeping the teams stable anyway is to practice seeking the truth even when your team disagrees with you and it might give a point to the other team, so I consider this a feature.
Notes: Many of the questions are easier to get approximately correct than exactly correct. I’ve usually scored a question as correct as long as the first significant digit was correct and the order of magnitude was correct, except for dates where usually the right decade is “close enough.” You should feel free to adjust the questions and the required accuracy to suit your group, but it’s worth announcing how accurate a correct answer needs to be before you begin.
If the Lonesome is very confident, their job gets easier. Few Lonesomes can be mislead on “What is two plus two?” That’s fine, though if all your Lonesomes are very confident and correct, it’s worth making more difficult questions. In case it needed to be said, the Lonesome isn’t allowed to look up the answer before guessing.
The Collective is allowed to lie. In particular, The Collective is allowed to lie about whether they looked up the answer. Since it’s more likely that The Collective is trying to mislead The Lonesome than it is that The Collective got to look up the answer ahead of time, Lonesomes shouldn’t blithely trust Collectives claiming to know the answer, but sometimes the consensus actually does know things individuals don’t.
If The Collective accidentally misleads The Lonesome to the wrong answer when they were trying to help them find the right answer, nobody gets any points. If The Collective accidentally leads The Lonesome to the right answer when trying to mislead, The Lonesome gets a point, The Collective does not, and also this is pretty funny.
Making The Lonesome wear a silly hat is optional, but mildly encouraged.