Oh. This discussion got me to go back and review some messages written in the aftermath of this, when I was trying to explain things to A… and I noticed a key thing I’d misremembered. (I should have reviewed those messages before posting this, but I thought that they only contained the same things that I already covered here.)
It wasn’t that A was making a different play that was getting the game into a better state; it was that he was doing a slightly different sequence of moves that nevertheless brought the game into exactly the same state as the originally agreed upon moves would have. That was what the “it doesn’t matter” was referring to.
Well that explains much better why this felt so confusing for the rest of us. I’ll rewrite this to make it more accurate shortly. Thanks for the comments on this version for making me look that up!
Okay, going through the messages in detail, the best account of what I can reconstruct of what actually happened is:
The mechanics in this particular game involved 1) a choice of what kind of an action to play 2) once the action had been chosen, a choice of where exactly to play it. Person A had previously agreed to make certain plays.
For one of the plays (call this “action 1”), communication had been ambiguous. A had ended up thinking that we’d agreed on the action to play but left the choice of where to play it up to him, whereas person B had ended up with the belief that we’d decided both on the action and the location.
We had also agreed on A doing another thing, call it “action 2a”.
When the time came, A noticed that if he played action 1 in a particular location, he could do another thing (“action 2b”) that would still lead to the same outcome that 2a would have led to.
Person A now said that it didn’t matter whether he played action 2a or action 2b, since by that point either one would lead to the same outcome.
However person B objected that A’s claim of “both 2a and 2b lead to the same result” was only true given that A had already decided to play that action in a different location than had already been decided, while B held that the choice of where to play it was part of what needed to be decided together.
And the specific thing that B found triggering was that (in her view) A didn’t even acknowledge that he was deviating from something that had already been agreed upon (the choice of where to play action 1), and instead that gave (what seemed to B like an) excuse for why it was okay to unilaterally change action 2.
That seems complex enough that I’m not sure how to rewrite the post to take it into account while also keeping it clear.
Oh. This discussion got me to go back and review some messages written in the aftermath of this, when I was trying to explain things to A… and I noticed a key thing I’d misremembered. (I should have reviewed those messages before posting this, but I thought that they only contained the same things that I already covered here.)
It wasn’t that A was making a different play that was getting the game into a better state; it was that he was doing a slightly different sequence of moves that nevertheless brought the game into exactly the same state as the originally agreed upon moves would have. That was what the “it doesn’t matter” was referring to.
Well that explains much better why this felt so confusing for the rest of us. I’ll rewrite this to make it more accurate shortly. Thanks for the comments on this version for making me look that up!
Okay, going through the messages in detail, the best account of what I can reconstruct of what actually happened is:
The mechanics in this particular game involved 1) a choice of what kind of an action to play 2) once the action had been chosen, a choice of where exactly to play it. Person A had previously agreed to make certain plays.
For one of the plays (call this “action 1”), communication had been ambiguous. A had ended up thinking that we’d agreed on the action to play but left the choice of where to play it up to him, whereas person B had ended up with the belief that we’d decided both on the action and the location.
We had also agreed on A doing another thing, call it “action 2a”.
When the time came, A noticed that if he played action 1 in a particular location, he could do another thing (“action 2b”) that would still lead to the same outcome that 2a would have led to.
Person A now said that it didn’t matter whether he played action 2a or action 2b, since by that point either one would lead to the same outcome.
However person B objected that A’s claim of “both 2a and 2b lead to the same result” was only true given that A had already decided to play that action in a different location than had already been decided, while B held that the choice of where to play it was part of what needed to be decided together.
And the specific thing that B found triggering was that (in her view) A didn’t even acknowledge that he was deviating from something that had already been agreed upon (the choice of where to play action 1), and instead that gave (what seemed to B like an) excuse for why it was okay to unilaterally change action 2.
That seems complex enough that I’m not sure how to rewrite the post to take it into account while also keeping it clear.