Also, one of the keys to winning as a villager is to recognize that there ARE werewolves, and they will interfere in two ways: they’ll gum up your communication and trust, and they will kill you if you are the biggest threat to them.
That said, I’m not sure the game metaphor applies well to real interactions. In reality, everyone is simultaneously a villager and a werewolf (a value producer and a competitor for resources/attention), and we shift between the roles pretty fluidly on different topics in different situations. And there are very real differences in underlying personality and capability dimensions, so there’s always the unknown distinction between “confused villager” and “werewolf”. Combined with the fact that at least some scarcity is not artificial (and even artificial scarcity is a constraint that can last for many years), I have to admit I’m not super hopeful of a solution.
And now that that’s said, I look forward to hearing about the experiments—finding ways to cooperate in the face of scarcity and distinct individual wants is the single most difficult problem in the future of intelligence and flourishing that I know of. I’ll gladly participate if it’ll help, but I highly recommend you start in small groups with more than just internet contact among them. (note: I’m not sure how strongly I recommend this—the scaling problem is real, and what works for a small group with only a few dozen potential coalitions may be near-irrelevant to larger structures with trillions of edges in the graph).
I strongly agree that in real life people aren’t assigned a “Villager” or “Werewolf” identity, rather they respond to perceived incentives and acculturation to sometimes present a character that implements Werewolf tactics, and other times they do things more characteristic of a Villager. My sense is that the social component of the problem is so strong that creating a pure-Villager feedback loop is going to be much more effective than trying to diffusely increase the quantity of Villagerness in the world (Cf. “raising the sanity waterline”), even though the former has to ultimately pay off in the latter.
Also, one of the keys to winning as a villager is to recognize that there ARE werewolves, and they will interfere in two ways: they’ll gum up your communication and trust, and they will kill you if you are the biggest threat to them.
That said, I’m not sure the game metaphor applies well to real interactions. In reality, everyone is simultaneously a villager and a werewolf (a value producer and a competitor for resources/attention), and we shift between the roles pretty fluidly on different topics in different situations. And there are very real differences in underlying personality and capability dimensions, so there’s always the unknown distinction between “confused villager” and “werewolf”. Combined with the fact that at least some scarcity is not artificial (and even artificial scarcity is a constraint that can last for many years), I have to admit I’m not super hopeful of a solution.
And now that that’s said, I look forward to hearing about the experiments—finding ways to cooperate in the face of scarcity and distinct individual wants is the single most difficult problem in the future of intelligence and flourishing that I know of. I’ll gladly participate if it’ll help, but I highly recommend you start in small groups with more than just internet contact among them. (note: I’m not sure how strongly I recommend this—the scaling problem is real, and what works for a small group with only a few dozen potential coalitions may be near-irrelevant to larger structures with trillions of edges in the graph).
I strongly agree that in real life people aren’t assigned a “Villager” or “Werewolf” identity, rather they respond to perceived incentives and acculturation to sometimes present a character that implements Werewolf tactics, and other times they do things more characteristic of a Villager. My sense is that the social component of the problem is so strong that creating a pure-Villager feedback loop is going to be much more effective than trying to diffusely increase the quantity of Villagerness in the world (Cf. “raising the sanity waterline”), even though the former has to ultimately pay off in the latter.