I’ve played Figgie a fair bit and don’t think it’s a good tool for teaching epistemics outside of a Jane Street trading internship.
To actually learn with it, you first need a number of motivated playing partners. They need to be quite skilled for their actions to be informative, and the game sucks before they reach this point. In my experience people don’t reach this skill level within their first couple hours of play. It also requires N custom-made decks for N rounds of play, or for everyone to install a specific app. So it’s really only practical for a trading firm internship program.
I have what I would call unusually good epistemics, and I mostly got there by obsessively reading the financial news (Bloomberg, Reuters) and making concrete predictions about how various stories would develop, and seeing where I went wrong. I’d ask myself questions like “how, concretely, did this article come into being?” I did this for about 9 months, and by the end I was rarely surprised by news items, could spot the signs of failure modes like circular reporting (super common), and had working mental models of many important institutions.
The other valuable thing I did was putting probabilities on everyday occurrences (65% confident I get home within 15 mins, etc.). I recorded these, and reflected on what went wrong when I deviated too far from perfect calibration.
In a slightly different vein, I think the D&D.Sci series is great at training analysis and inference (though I will admit I haven’t sat down to do one properly).
Depending on your exact goals, a simulated trading challenge might be better than that, which I have even more thoughts about (and hopefully, someday, plans for).
Having learned about this game right now, this is my idea to set up a random deck (so not field-tested, and maybe I’m misunderstanding):
Separate into 4 piles of 12 cards, according to suit, face down.
Another person moves the piles about like in 3-card Monty until no one knows where each suit is.
Randomly choose 3 piles to remove 2, 2, and 4 cards. Or always remove 4 from the first, 2 each from the next ones, from left to right or by whatever convention.
It also requires N custom-made decks for N rounds of play
You can make a figgie deck by taking a normal deck of cards and removing 1, 3, 3, and 5 cards from randomly-selected suits. This is easiest to do if you have a non-participant dealer, but if you don’t, it’s not too hard to come up with a protocol that allows you to do this as part of shuffling without anyone knowing the results.
For example: A moves the piles with B watching and C+D looking away, then C removes 1 / 3 / 3 / 5 cards from random piles and shuffles them together with D watching and A+B looking away.
you can just remove 1 card from each suit permanently before playing, leaving 0 / 2 / 2 / 4 to remove each game
you don’t need to split the entire deck into suits, just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those (though I guess in practice the game often separates cards into suits anyway, so maybe this doesn’t matter)
just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those
I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.
(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)
I think all of Ben’s and my proposals have assumed (without saying explicitly) that you shuffle within each suit. If you do that, then I think your concerns all go away? Let me know if you don’t think so.
I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.
I’ve played Figgie a fair bit and don’t think it’s a good tool for teaching epistemics outside of a Jane Street trading internship.
To actually learn with it, you first need a number of motivated playing partners. They need to be quite skilled for their actions to be informative, and the game sucks before they reach this point. In my experience people don’t reach this skill level within their first couple hours of play. It also requires N custom-made decks for N rounds of play, or for everyone to install a specific app. So it’s really only practical for a trading firm internship program.
I have what I would call unusually good epistemics, and I mostly got there by obsessively reading the financial news (Bloomberg, Reuters) and making concrete predictions about how various stories would develop, and seeing where I went wrong. I’d ask myself questions like “how, concretely, did this article come into being?” I did this for about 9 months, and by the end I was rarely surprised by news items, could spot the signs of failure modes like circular reporting (super common), and had working mental models of many important institutions.
The other valuable thing I did was putting probabilities on everyday occurrences (65% confident I get home within 15 mins, etc.). I recorded these, and reflected on what went wrong when I deviated too far from perfect calibration.
Figgie may not be a good game but it’s certainly better then poker, what game would be better then Figgie?
In a slightly different vein, I think the D&D.Sci series is great at training analysis and inference (though I will admit I haven’t sat down to do one properly).
Depending on your exact goals, a simulated trading challenge might be better than that, which I have even more thoughts about (and hopefully, someday, plans for).
Having learned about this game right now, this is my idea to set up a random deck (so not field-tested, and maybe I’m misunderstanding):
Separate into 4 piles of 12 cards, according to suit, face down.
Another person moves the piles about like in 3-card Monty until no one knows where each suit is.
Randomly choose 3 piles to remove 2, 2, and 4 cards. Or always remove 4 from the first, 2 each from the next ones, from left to right or by whatever convention.
Shuffle together remaining piles, deal.
You can make a figgie deck by taking a normal deck of cards and removing 1, 3, 3, and 5 cards from randomly-selected suits. This is easiest to do if you have a non-participant dealer, but if you don’t, it’s not too hard to come up with a protocol that allows you to do this as part of shuffling without anyone knowing the results.
For example: A moves the piles with B watching and C+D looking away, then C removes 1 / 3 / 3 / 5 cards from random piles and shuffles them together with D watching and A+B looking away.
right, and as further small optimisations:
you can just remove 1 card from each suit permanently before playing, leaving 0 / 2 / 2 / 4 to remove each game
you don’t need to split the entire deck into suits, just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those (though I guess in practice the game often separates cards into suits anyway, so maybe this doesn’t matter)
I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.
(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)
I think all of Ben’s and my proposals have assumed (without saying explicitly) that you shuffle within each suit. If you do that, then I think your concerns all go away? Let me know if you don’t think so.
I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.