It’s a crowd I’d come into contact with as a manager of an online bookshop (and most of the reason I quitted). Usually, I can pretend they don’t exist, but… we all know how it goes… and now that they don’t make my blood boil every weekend, I can afford to speak about them.
“Some other people” will play to win—say, a facebook lottery with a book for a prize, and they will mean it. If they don’t win, they will say the lottery was rigged. Public righteous indignation on every player’s behalf is a weapon (and for the manager, a potent vaccine against righteously indignant polemics of many other kinds). Private appeals to the manager’s pity; commenting the rules’ exploitable/exploited loopholes—after the winner is announced; repeating actions which have already been answered elsewhere in the thread. I don’t include ‘filing a complaint’ here, because it’s frankly too straightforward for most of them, most of the time; the bookshop would likely send them a book with an eloquent blessing/apology, just to get them to shut up and earn good PR points for “owning up to mistakes”. But in practice, it still matters too much to be the actual winner, and the brain of the trophy-gatherer works like other brains don’t. At least not for a while.
I’m not unusually out-of-touch with customers; I was recommended for the job after two years in an offline shop. And this was… entirely different. I’d never encountered people with whole profiles dedicated to reposting online lotteries—living people I had to call on the phone. It is another world.
When I read about (simple) “pure” game theoretical problems, in which the players “care only about winning”, I cannot reconcile the image of Worthy Rivals the author has in mind with the actual Really-Want-This-Whatever Whiners who seek out such contests. Get it, not the passively allowing themselves to be drawn into a strategic game kind of players, but the self-sorting to exploit as many offers as possible kind. They will be few, yes. Nobody of them might force their way through every single time.
But they will define the meaning of the rules you think you write.
Not any particular book, but rather some frequent conditions of game theory problems I have seen here and elsewhere (my fb friend keeps posting such pieces). “The players care only about winning” etc. Well, some people actually do.
Some other people who play to win
It’s a crowd I’d come into contact with as a manager of an online bookshop (and most of the reason I quitted). Usually, I can pretend they don’t exist, but… we all know how it goes… and now that they don’t make my blood boil every weekend, I can afford to speak about them.
“Some other people” will play to win—say, a facebook lottery with a book for a prize, and they will mean it. If they don’t win, they will say the lottery was rigged. Public righteous indignation on every player’s behalf is a weapon (and for the manager, a potent vaccine against righteously indignant polemics of many other kinds). Private appeals to the manager’s pity; commenting the rules’ exploitable/exploited loopholes—after the winner is announced; repeating actions which have already been answered elsewhere in the thread. I don’t include ‘filing a complaint’ here, because it’s frankly too straightforward for most of them, most of the time; the bookshop would likely send them a book with an eloquent blessing/apology, just to get them to shut up and earn good PR points for “owning up to mistakes”. But in practice, it still matters too much to be the actual winner, and the brain of the trophy-gatherer works like other brains don’t. At least not for a while.
I’m not unusually out-of-touch with customers; I was recommended for the job after two years in an offline shop. And this was… entirely different. I’d never encountered people with whole profiles dedicated to reposting online lotteries—living people I had to call on the phone. It is another world.
When I read about (simple) “pure” game theoretical problems, in which the players “care only about winning”, I cannot reconcile the image of Worthy Rivals the author has in mind with the actual Really-Want-This-Whatever Whiners who seek out such contests. Get it, not the passively allowing themselves to be drawn into a strategic game kind of players, but the self-sorting to exploit as many offers as possible kind. They will be few, yes. Nobody of them might force their way through every single time.
But they will define the meaning of the rules you think you write.
What’s the book?
Not any particular book, but rather some frequent conditions of game theory problems I have seen here and elsewhere (my fb friend keeps posting such pieces). “The players care only about winning” etc. Well, some people actually do.