I find myself doing something very similar when it comes to every day activities. Let’s say I am searching for my missing sock and I have three locations to visit: A, B, C, with probabilities of finding my sock there: 80%, 15%, 5%. For some reason I keep wanting to search C, then B, before A. In my mind this kind of goes like this “let’s make sure it’s in none of the weird places and then I can be very sure it’s in A and search it thoroughly”.
Empirically, most often if I just started with A, I would have been successful...80% of the time.
But to answer OP more directly: I feel that in most cases it’s simple akrasia and the fear of succeeding.
I’ve noticed that some video games tend to directly reward this behavior (starting your search in the worst place). They provide a big maze, with a goal at the end that you’re supposedly trying to get to, but in fact your goal is not to reach the end quickly but to search as much of the maze’s area as you can. Similarly, if you’re on a quest to save the world, you put it off as long as possible, because you’re optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning. Some of the errors taught are very subtle and insidious.
Now I’m wondering how you could subvert that. I’m imagining something like a Legend of Zelda game which is split into two phases:
A fairly long preliminary phase, where you don’t know about saving the world or anything. This should have maybe one or two boss fights and teach you how to play the game well.
A race against time to save the world. Bad stuff starts happening at preset times (plus or minus some randomness), and you’ve got to hurry and go for the high-probability ideas in order to maximize your chance of not losing. Skip the side-quests and mini-dungeons unless they’ve got some important items, because Kakariko village will be destroyed in 4-5 hours of game-time. To enhance the sense of urgency, make save-scumming impossible and make it harder to die in order to compensate for the increased difficulty of gameplay. Make sure there are several ways to win in any scenario, so the player doesn’t have to rely on trial-and-error to find the one officially blessed way of doing something. And to hell with switch mazes.
I would definitely play this game. It would be intense. And the quest for 100% completion would result in absolutely crazy Let’s Play videos.
I’d suggest looking at Pathologic, which implements a world-saving task with a set time limit. You are free to walk around, talk to people and just try to do your regular side-questing, but you need to learn some things and do somethings before the first day is over, you lose. The gameworld is pretty alive in itself—important characters will move around on their daily business, making you ask people for possible directions.
It creates a lifelike situation, where you can’t really predict the causal links between your actions and possible progress towards your goal.
I noticed that the decribed fallacy can only be applied to cases where you are able to evaluate with some reliability the possible returns. Let’s say you’re trying to learn about druidic herbology. You could spend time t1 to find some books on it and time t2 on reading those books for skillset s. Or you could spend T1 > t1 to find an expert in the field and ask for lessons/best books and then spend T2 on studying towards skillset S. The problem is that you can predict t1 and T1, but until either of them is done, you can’t evaluate the related extra time needed or the value of the skillsets.
Warning: I tried Pathologic. It’s a gem of a game, but a very unpolished one, and the translation is absolutely horrible. It may still be worth trying, if you can look past that; if you know russian, certainly, since you can then get the un-translated version.
I hear there’s a fan-translation project going on, but they haven’t gotten too far. Maybe in a year or two.
A couple of roguelikes work this way. ADOM, in particular, gives you a very fixed period of time to save the world from an incursion of Chaos before said incursion and its radiation-like effects start making it very much harder.
That sounds a lot like the actual game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. You have a fixed time limit in which to save the world, and if you don’t, you have to go back in time and watch most of your progress become undone.
Yeah, right! I’m playing through this right now, and all the important things get saved when you play the Song of Time. But the most important part is that there’s no penalty to wasting time: you could spend all 3 days looking for one heart piece, and whether you did or didn’t find it, you’d be no worse off after playing the Song of Time again.
Persona 3 and 4 actually do integrate something like this; they run on a calendar with fixed dates for important plot events. They’re very compelling because of it; you really have to time-manage if you want to optimise for content-seen (and you are rewarded for managing it).
I’ve long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful. I found Vampire: Bloodlines an interesting alternative, in that you were rewarded skill points for finishing quests, and you’d get the same reward whether you slaughtered everyone, snuck through, or any other way of solving the problem.
As for side quests, I guess the problem is that the developers spend an enormous amount of time generating them all, and don’t want to see that time as essentially wasted, especially since a large number of people don’t do them anyway. Considering just how expensive a modern AAA game has become to create, it’s hard to imagine you could persuade RPG developers to punish people for undertaking side quests, even if it does lead to the ridiculous situations where you’re supposedly racing against time to save the world/galaxy/universe, but have time to help every kitten stuck in a tree on the way.
I’ve long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful.
I noticed something similar. A while back, I figured that a game’s quests didn’t technically require you to kill, so I tried to play the game with a pacifist character—basically, set up so he can’t fight, but has skills in persuasion and sneaking around. But for some reason, the game forces you to fight even when the storyline doesn’t literally require it. (The game was Morrowind.)
I had a related experience with Knights of the Old Republic. One of the storyline quests is to “sneak” into the enemy’s base and steal a special item. I took that literally and used my rogue’s special abilities to sneak past all the enemies, and even pilfer the special item undetected, but then that triggers a scripted dialogue with a guy near it and makes you fight a boss. Turns out that “sneaking in” means openly fighting a dungeon of monsters in the base...
I even tried the pacifist approach in … Hitman 2, where I would try to kill the target by tricking other enemies into to shooting him dead.
(I went through a pacifist phase, if you couldn’t tell.)
Wow Jim, that’s actually a really really amazing insight.
a goal at the end that you’re supposedly trying to get to, but in fact your goal is not to reach the end quickly but to search as much of the maze’s area as you can
you put it off as long as possible, because you’re optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning
Do you think people get a feeling of, “Well, I’ll get there eventually anyways, so I might as well (have some ice cream / surf the net / watch some TV / screw around)?” Fascinating if true… hmm...
I have to be careful setting my goals because if it looks something like (read this paper by the end of the day), then unless I have other more pressing concerns, it will take all of my productive time that day to read the paper. Even though the paper will in actuality take at most 2-3 hours to read and understand, probably closer to an hour and a half.
My best counter to the problem is to remove the time limit on the goal. It’s counter-intuitive, but there’s something in my brain that will see a concrete time limit and decide that as long as it gets done by that limit it’s fine to be wasteful with the rest of my time.
But to answer OP more directly: I feel that in most cases it’s simple akrasia and the fear of succeeding.
Yeah, maybe it’s just that. I love that Bruce post by the way, that’s one of my favorite posts on here. That one and “Generalizing From One Example” are probably my favorite non-Eliezer posts.
I find myself doing something very similar when it comes to every day activities. Let’s say I am searching for my missing sock and I have three locations to visit: A, B, C, with probabilities of finding my sock there: 80%, 15%, 5%. For some reason I keep wanting to search C, then B, before A. In my mind this kind of goes like this “let’s make sure it’s in none of the weird places and then I can be very sure it’s in A and search it thoroughly”. Empirically, most often if I just started with A, I would have been successful...80% of the time.
But to answer OP more directly: I feel that in most cases it’s simple akrasia and the fear of succeeding.
I’ve noticed that some video games tend to directly reward this behavior (starting your search in the worst place). They provide a big maze, with a goal at the end that you’re supposedly trying to get to, but in fact your goal is not to reach the end quickly but to search as much of the maze’s area as you can. Similarly, if you’re on a quest to save the world, you put it off as long as possible, because you’re optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning. Some of the errors taught are very subtle and insidious.
Now I’m wondering how you could subvert that. I’m imagining something like a Legend of Zelda game which is split into two phases:
A fairly long preliminary phase, where you don’t know about saving the world or anything. This should have maybe one or two boss fights and teach you how to play the game well.
A race against time to save the world. Bad stuff starts happening at preset times (plus or minus some randomness), and you’ve got to hurry and go for the high-probability ideas in order to maximize your chance of not losing. Skip the side-quests and mini-dungeons unless they’ve got some important items, because Kakariko village will be destroyed in 4-5 hours of game-time. To enhance the sense of urgency, make save-scumming impossible and make it harder to die in order to compensate for the increased difficulty of gameplay. Make sure there are several ways to win in any scenario, so the player doesn’t have to rely on trial-and-error to find the one officially blessed way of doing something. And to hell with switch mazes.
I would definitely play this game. It would be intense. And the quest for 100% completion would result in absolutely crazy Let’s Play videos.
I’d suggest looking at Pathologic, which implements a world-saving task with a set time limit. You are free to walk around, talk to people and just try to do your regular side-questing, but you need to learn some things and do somethings before the first day is over, you lose. The gameworld is pretty alive in itself—important characters will move around on their daily business, making you ask people for possible directions.
It creates a lifelike situation, where you can’t really predict the causal links between your actions and possible progress towards your goal.
I noticed that the decribed fallacy can only be applied to cases where you are able to evaluate with some reliability the possible returns. Let’s say you’re trying to learn about druidic herbology. You could spend time t1 to find some books on it and time t2 on reading those books for skillset s. Or you could spend T1 > t1 to find an expert in the field and ask for lessons/best books and then spend T2 on studying towards skillset S. The problem is that you can predict t1 and T1, but until either of them is done, you can’t evaluate the related extra time needed or the value of the skillsets.
Warning: I tried Pathologic. It’s a gem of a game, but a very unpolished one, and the translation is absolutely horrible. It may still be worth trying, if you can look past that; if you know russian, certainly, since you can then get the un-translated version.
I hear there’s a fan-translation project going on, but they haven’t gotten too far. Maybe in a year or two.
A couple of roguelikes work this way. ADOM, in particular, gives you a very fixed period of time to save the world from an incursion of Chaos before said incursion and its radiation-like effects start making it very much harder.
Dead rising had a bunch of that going on.
That sounds a lot like the actual game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. You have a fixed time limit in which to save the world, and if you don’t, you have to go back in time and watch most of your progress become undone.
Yeah, right! I’m playing through this right now, and all the important things get saved when you play the Song of Time. But the most important part is that there’s no penalty to wasting time: you could spend all 3 days looking for one heart piece, and whether you did or didn’t find it, you’d be no worse off after playing the Song of Time again.
Persona 3 and 4 actually do integrate something like this; they run on a calendar with fixed dates for important plot events. They’re very compelling because of it; you really have to time-manage if you want to optimise for content-seen (and you are rewarded for managing it).
I’ve long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful. I found Vampire: Bloodlines an interesting alternative, in that you were rewarded skill points for finishing quests, and you’d get the same reward whether you slaughtered everyone, snuck through, or any other way of solving the problem.
As for side quests, I guess the problem is that the developers spend an enormous amount of time generating them all, and don’t want to see that time as essentially wasted, especially since a large number of people don’t do them anyway. Considering just how expensive a modern AAA game has become to create, it’s hard to imagine you could persuade RPG developers to punish people for undertaking side quests, even if it does lead to the ridiculous situations where you’re supposedly racing against time to save the world/galaxy/universe, but have time to help every kitten stuck in a tree on the way.
I noticed something similar. A while back, I figured that a game’s quests didn’t technically require you to kill, so I tried to play the game with a pacifist character—basically, set up so he can’t fight, but has skills in persuasion and sneaking around. But for some reason, the game forces you to fight even when the storyline doesn’t literally require it. (The game was Morrowind.)
I had a related experience with Knights of the Old Republic. One of the storyline quests is to “sneak” into the enemy’s base and steal a special item. I took that literally and used my rogue’s special abilities to sneak past all the enemies, and even pilfer the special item undetected, but then that triggers a scripted dialogue with a guy near it and makes you fight a boss. Turns out that “sneaking in” means openly fighting a dungeon of monsters in the base...
I even tried the pacifist approach in … Hitman 2, where I would try to kill the target by tricking other enemies into to shooting him dead.
(I went through a pacifist phase, if you couldn’t tell.)
Wow Jim, that’s actually a really really amazing insight.
Do you think people get a feeling of, “Well, I’ll get there eventually anyways, so I might as well (have some ice cream / surf the net / watch some TV / screw around)?” Fascinating if true… hmm...
For me: yes, definitely.
I have to be careful setting my goals because if it looks something like (read this paper by the end of the day), then unless I have other more pressing concerns, it will take all of my productive time that day to read the paper. Even though the paper will in actuality take at most 2-3 hours to read and understand, probably closer to an hour and a half.
My best counter to the problem is to remove the time limit on the goal. It’s counter-intuitive, but there’s something in my brain that will see a concrete time limit and decide that as long as it gets done by that limit it’s fine to be wasteful with the rest of my time.
I think I feel like that sometimes.
Yeah, isn’t it screwed up that whenever you look for something, it always turns out to have been in the last place you looked?
Yeah, maybe it’s just that. I love that Bruce post by the way, that’s one of my favorite posts on here. That one and “Generalizing From One Example” are probably my favorite non-Eliezer posts.