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 :{
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.
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.