It occurs to me that games with some significant strategic component might be useful for priming the “but what consequences does it have?” response. I’m thinking of games like Magic: the Gathering, Settlers of Catan, Risk, etc. (I’m sure the board game aficionados will have better examples than I). I say this because of personal experience with Magic players—as they get better at magic, they tend to get better at life. Well, some of them do. The others perhaps compartmentalize too much, so maybe this won’t help with everyone.
In any case, my model for what would work is a relatively easy social game that allows a non-trivial number of actions with unclear consequences… unless you stop to think about them. Magic would be perfect… if it wasn’t so complicated and if fantasy tropes didn’t turn off a large segment of the population. Ideally the game would be something you create instead of something your subjects/clients may have played before.
I have no ideas for the actual game, but maybe this sparks someone else’s imagination.
If I’m thinking of games to reinforce consequentialism, my first thought is to use games with actual story involved; you don’t lose points, or regions, or so on, you lose the lives of characters you’re attached to, or their trust, or maybe you fail to prevent a genocide, etc. Things which people will be more likely to associate “this is a bad game outcome” with “this would have been a bad choice in real life.”
The first solution that comes to mind for this is a video game, perhaps some kind of visual novel that features a large number of choices and forces the players to choose consequentially on pain of causing Bad Things to happen in the game. But I don’t think this is actually a very good solution considering how much effort it takes to make a visual novel, which can be played in its entirety and will no longer offer a single new choice afterwards, and how many people are simply not interested in playing visual novels.
Maybe some sort of roleplay would be more feasible, at least you wouldn’t be designing a whole video game for each scenario, but it still sounds like an awful lot of work.
I sometimes try to get myself to make better decisions by pretending I’m a character in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. (E.g. “If you decide to stay on the couch because you’re too lazy to work, turn to page 30.”) Unfortunately, in the real books it’s rare that enough information is given for you to make a really good decision, and the authors also appear to like messing with you by having good decisions blow up in your face.
So, maybe a similar book that actually gave you enough information to make a good decision and rewarded good decisions and punished bad ones?
I don’t know how many people have this issue, but I can’t read Choose Your Own Adventure books without marking several past pages so I can rewind time, or try multiple branches, or safely find out what was hidden behind the venomous Venusian potted plant. Really, the only bound on it is that I eventually run out of fingers to mark my place, which constrains my time travel abilities to about four save-states. (In visual novels it’s even worse, since there are enough actual save states that saving at anything that looks like a potentially significant branching point becomes viable. I’ve actually started using walkthroughs from GameFAQs to find out where I don’t need to save, so I can stop fretting about making an irreversible decision. Trivial time travel is surprisingly addictive! What would the world be like if everyone could do it, I wonder?)
I really, really wish that this were a useful approach to life, but if it’s possible to save and restore universe states, I have not been made aware of this. And obviously I haven’t noticed anybody else doing it.
At least visual novels (well, the two or three of them that I’ve played) are pretty good about giving your decisions reasonable consequences based on what you know or should be able to infer. If I’m remembering my childhood well, Choose Your Own Adventure books have a nasty habit of dropping you into unwinnable states based on trite moral dilemmas, when they aren’t dropping you into unwinnable states for no good reason at all. Not that life’s fair in that regard either, but CYOA doesn’t even give you the option of taking the steps that could ameliorate it.
So I’ve got to doubt the usefulness of this as a general decision procedure. Seems to me that it’d lead to overweighting conventional social mores and social risks in general, and underweighting the sort of fact-finding and risk minimization that actually works. Which, while not as immediately suboptimal as ignoring the “Beware of Yeti” sign or playing patty-cake with the toaster in the bathtub, is probably a lot more salient for a halfway sane decision-maker.
This is one of the things I originally found disconcerting about the board game Arabian Nights. It’s like anti-consequentialism: You would have options of things to do, and the option that seemed the most logical (“I’ll give change to the beggar” or “I’ll ignore the beggar”) never gave as good of results as the craziest options (“I’ll worship the beggar” or “I’ll steal from the beggar”, etc). I ended up getting the best results by choosing the weirdest option available.
That strategy doesn’t ALWAYS work out poorly in weird life. If you go through life looking for opportunities to make your life weirder, it WILL be interesting, if nothing else. Of course, you might also get shot.
IMHO that’s a really important point. You get a better grasp about consequences of your choice after trying several options and seeing how the consequences of different actions differ.
The best laboratory example of this is playing go on a computer. Typical go software records your games, and then lets you replay, play different variants, analyze when things went really bad after a silly move, etc. After a while you get a tree of diverging game records. In some you won, in others you lost. It’s a good learning experience.
(disclaimer: I’m not sure how to un-compartmentalize this learning to be applicable in real life, not just in a game of go)
I do the same thing. I found that I needed far fewer save states when I routinely took the BAD choice first, since they usually lead to the shortest further decision tree. I’d also occasionally use physical bookmarks, for the few rare books that just would NOT kill you off until the very end (even though you were quite possibly stuck on a guaranteed-negative branch of the decision tree)
As to applying it to real life, I will sometimes think about the decision tree involved. Playing Chess is a good example of this: If I make THIS move, my opponent could do X, Y, or Z. If she goes with X, I can do X-a, X-b, or X-c… and then weighing all this based on probability (“She hates doing X!” “Y is her best move!”) and expected value (if she does X, I’ll lose. If she does Y, I go up a pawn.) Fortunate for me that she hates doing X :)
I have two interpretations of your idea, so I’ll just say what I think of both.
1) Underlying, known, game mechanics with a story behind them involving role playing.
I like this because it gives the players something they can easily point to and say “look, consequences!” in the game mechanics while making the situation feel closer to reality. However, reality doesn’t give you the mechanics by which it works, so this may not translate into real-life decision making as well. On the upside, this is easy to make into a social game—think DnD but with less magic and dice.
2) No game mechanics, just a “choose your own adventure” game.
The consequences are more nebulous in this version, which is both a positive and a negative. It’s a positive because it forces more brainstorming of actual consequences, but it’s a negative because that makes it harder to initially start thinking about the consequences of actions. It’s also difficult to make this type of game vary from playthrough to playthrough.
Starting with a type 1) game and then moving to a type 2) game seems like it might take advantage of both types’ strengths. Alternatively, there’s really a continuum between the two types, so maybe somewhere closer to the middle is best.
I say this because of personal experience with Magic players—as they get better at magic, they tend to get better at life. Well, some of them do. The others perhaps compartmentalize too much, so maybe this won’t help with everyone.
Really? I sure haven’t noticed this. If anything from my own circle of acquaintances it looks like those who got better at life were the ones who stopped putting so much of their time and attention into card games.
Roughly, there’s two populations—those who apply what they learned in magic (microeconomics, essentially) to life and those that don’t. The latter tend to spend way to much time on card games. The former start saying things like “this event is pretty low EV for me, i think I better study/write that paper/work on that project/etc. instead.”
In any case, as people get better at Magic, they get better at thinking about the consequences of their actions within the game. This seems like a natural stepping stone to thinking about consequences in all situations, though the trick is getting people to generalize it.
The latter tend to spend way to much time on card games. The former start saying things like “this event is pretty low EV for me, i think I better study/write that paper/work on that project/etc. instead.”
How would one distinguish between the scenario in which they begin to apply Magic-like thinking to their regular life and begin optimizing there, and the scenario in which ordinary diminishing marginal returns to playing Magic causes them to switch to the other activities?
If I was sensible, I probably should stop playing Magic, or at least paying money for cards… but I have too much of my self-esteem wrapped up in that stupid game. It’s like trying to quit smoking. :P
This is why I tend to have an immediate aversion to using Magic as a rationality teacher. The whole game is set up on a business model that incentivizes constantly shelling out money for new cards to keep your deck from becoming obsolete. Wizards Of The Coast’s goal is to make sure that their players cannot continue to be competitive without providing a constant revenue flow. If you want to teach people good rationality skills, don’t start by encouraging them to get into something like that.
I’ve always been turned off my MtG on the grounds that I should just be able to print up any cards I like and use them as long as they form a valid deck, rather than having to follow WotC’s anti-”counterfeiting” policy. Do any Magic players actually do this?
People create “proxy” decks all the time. It’s one of the dominant ways of testing for big tournaments (when you don’t know what cards you’ll need until you settle on a decklist, but you don’t want to buy every potential card). However, for some reason the casual community doesn’t seem to do this as much. This is somewhat ironic because sanctioned tournaments are the only place you have to use real cards.
I have friends who did so, but they only used them to compose special print decks to play with the few other friends who were also using print decks, and I think they used their “real” decks more even among each other than the print decks.
Careful, there: some vindictiveness (“if you attack me in Africa despite our pact, I will go totally apeshit on you for the rest of the game”) is an essential part of playing e.g. Risk well (in our group) - naive consequentialism (“looks like I lost Africa, taking Australia from (unrelated player) seems best now”) does not work very well on intelligent and adversarial agents.
Of course, most of the world is not an intelligent and adversarial agent—pre-committing to going totally apeshit on an unthinking animal is just stupid. The easiest and biggest wins for consequentialism are there, not in games of Risk.
(Non-naive consequentialism works fine. Naive consequentialism probably works fine in many games, e.g. two-player games like Magic.)
Careful, there: some vindictiveness (“if you attack me in Africa despite our pact, I will go totally apeshit on you for the rest of the game”) is an essential part of playing e.g. Risk well (in our group) - naive consequentialism (“looks like I lost Africa, taking Australia from (unrelated player) seems best now”) does not work very well on intelligent and adversarial agents.
Totally agree. I’m ruthlessly vindictive but perfectly trustworthy (meaning I refrain from making promises I do not keep) when it comes to strategic situations like that. It looks superficially like being completely unsophisticated but it works.
It occurs to me that games with some significant strategic component might be useful for priming the “but what consequences does it have?” response. I’m thinking of games like Magic: the Gathering, Settlers of Catan, Risk, etc. (I’m sure the board game aficionados will have better examples than I). I say this because of personal experience with Magic players—as they get better at magic, they tend to get better at life. Well, some of them do. The others perhaps compartmentalize too much, so maybe this won’t help with everyone.
In any case, my model for what would work is a relatively easy social game that allows a non-trivial number of actions with unclear consequences… unless you stop to think about them. Magic would be perfect… if it wasn’t so complicated and if fantasy tropes didn’t turn off a large segment of the population. Ideally the game would be something you create instead of something your subjects/clients may have played before.
I have no ideas for the actual game, but maybe this sparks someone else’s imagination.
If I’m thinking of games to reinforce consequentialism, my first thought is to use games with actual story involved; you don’t lose points, or regions, or so on, you lose the lives of characters you’re attached to, or their trust, or maybe you fail to prevent a genocide, etc. Things which people will be more likely to associate “this is a bad game outcome” with “this would have been a bad choice in real life.”
The first solution that comes to mind for this is a video game, perhaps some kind of visual novel that features a large number of choices and forces the players to choose consequentially on pain of causing Bad Things to happen in the game. But I don’t think this is actually a very good solution considering how much effort it takes to make a visual novel, which can be played in its entirety and will no longer offer a single new choice afterwards, and how many people are simply not interested in playing visual novels.
Maybe some sort of roleplay would be more feasible, at least you wouldn’t be designing a whole video game for each scenario, but it still sounds like an awful lot of work.
I sometimes try to get myself to make better decisions by pretending I’m a character in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. (E.g. “If you decide to stay on the couch because you’re too lazy to work, turn to page 30.”) Unfortunately, in the real books it’s rare that enough information is given for you to make a really good decision, and the authors also appear to like messing with you by having good decisions blow up in your face.
So, maybe a similar book that actually gave you enough information to make a good decision and rewarded good decisions and punished bad ones?
This sounds like a more useful, more intuitive, much more widely applicable reification of my own method of “What Would Your TV Tropes Page Say?”
I don’t know how many people have this issue, but I can’t read Choose Your Own Adventure books without marking several past pages so I can rewind time, or try multiple branches, or safely find out what was hidden behind the venomous Venusian potted plant. Really, the only bound on it is that I eventually run out of fingers to mark my place, which constrains my time travel abilities to about four save-states. (In visual novels it’s even worse, since there are enough actual save states that saving at anything that looks like a potentially significant branching point becomes viable. I’ve actually started using walkthroughs from GameFAQs to find out where I don’t need to save, so I can stop fretting about making an irreversible decision. Trivial time travel is surprisingly addictive! What would the world be like if everyone could do it, I wonder?)
I really, really wish that this were a useful approach to life, but if it’s possible to save and restore universe states, I have not been made aware of this. And obviously I haven’t noticed anybody else doing it.
At least visual novels (well, the two or three of them that I’ve played) are pretty good about giving your decisions reasonable consequences based on what you know or should be able to infer. If I’m remembering my childhood well, Choose Your Own Adventure books have a nasty habit of dropping you into unwinnable states based on trite moral dilemmas, when they aren’t dropping you into unwinnable states for no good reason at all. Not that life’s fair in that regard either, but CYOA doesn’t even give you the option of taking the steps that could ameliorate it.
So I’ve got to doubt the usefulness of this as a general decision procedure. Seems to me that it’d lead to overweighting conventional social mores and social risks in general, and underweighting the sort of fact-finding and risk minimization that actually works. Which, while not as immediately suboptimal as ignoring the “Beware of Yeti” sign or playing patty-cake with the toaster in the bathtub, is probably a lot more salient for a halfway sane decision-maker.
This is one of the things I originally found disconcerting about the board game Arabian Nights. It’s like anti-consequentialism: You would have options of things to do, and the option that seemed the most logical (“I’ll give change to the beggar” or “I’ll ignore the beggar”) never gave as good of results as the craziest options (“I’ll worship the beggar” or “I’ll steal from the beggar”, etc). I ended up getting the best results by choosing the weirdest option available.
That strategy doesn’t ALWAYS work out poorly in weird life. If you go through life looking for opportunities to make your life weirder, it WILL be interesting, if nothing else. Of course, you might also get shot.
IMHO that’s a really important point. You get a better grasp about consequences of your choice after trying several options and seeing how the consequences of different actions differ.
The best laboratory example of this is playing go on a computer. Typical go software records your games, and then lets you replay, play different variants, analyze when things went really bad after a silly move, etc. After a while you get a tree of diverging game records. In some you won, in others you lost. It’s a good learning experience.
(disclaimer: I’m not sure how to un-compartmentalize this learning to be applicable in real life, not just in a game of go)
I do the same thing. I found that I needed far fewer save states when I routinely took the BAD choice first, since they usually lead to the shortest further decision tree. I’d also occasionally use physical bookmarks, for the few rare books that just would NOT kill you off until the very end (even though you were quite possibly stuck on a guaranteed-negative branch of the decision tree)
As to applying it to real life, I will sometimes think about the decision tree involved. Playing Chess is a good example of this: If I make THIS move, my opponent could do X, Y, or Z. If she goes with X, I can do X-a, X-b, or X-c… and then weighing all this based on probability (“She hates doing X!” “Y is her best move!”) and expected value (if she does X, I’ll lose. If she does Y, I go up a pawn.) Fortunate for me that she hates doing X :)
The problem with TV Tropes is that they’ve been heavily primed with fictional evidence.
If you are influenced by the fictional evidence, your TV Tropes page will say Wrong Genre Savvy.
“Real Life” isn’t a genre. Or if it is, it has only one trope, and that is Reality Ensues.
Incidentally, Eliezer actually does have a TV Tropes page.
reminds me of http://www.epicsplosion.com/epicsploitation/adventures , maybe you’ll be able to find something there?
I have two interpretations of your idea, so I’ll just say what I think of both.
1) Underlying, known, game mechanics with a story behind them involving role playing.
I like this because it gives the players something they can easily point to and say “look, consequences!” in the game mechanics while making the situation feel closer to reality. However, reality doesn’t give you the mechanics by which it works, so this may not translate into real-life decision making as well. On the upside, this is easy to make into a social game—think DnD but with less magic and dice.
2) No game mechanics, just a “choose your own adventure” game.
The consequences are more nebulous in this version, which is both a positive and a negative. It’s a positive because it forces more brainstorming of actual consequences, but it’s a negative because that makes it harder to initially start thinking about the consequences of actions. It’s also difficult to make this type of game vary from playthrough to playthrough.
Starting with a type 1) game and then moving to a type 2) game seems like it might take advantage of both types’ strengths. Alternatively, there’s really a continuum between the two types, so maybe somewhere closer to the middle is best.
Really? I sure haven’t noticed this. If anything from my own circle of acquaintances it looks like those who got better at life were the ones who stopped putting so much of their time and attention into card games.
Roughly, there’s two populations—those who apply what they learned in magic (microeconomics, essentially) to life and those that don’t. The latter tend to spend way to much time on card games. The former start saying things like “this event is pretty low EV for me, i think I better study/write that paper/work on that project/etc. instead.”
In any case, as people get better at Magic, they get better at thinking about the consequences of their actions within the game. This seems like a natural stepping stone to thinking about consequences in all situations, though the trick is getting people to generalize it.
How would one distinguish between the scenario in which they begin to apply Magic-like thinking to their regular life and begin optimizing there, and the scenario in which ordinary diminishing marginal returns to playing Magic causes them to switch to the other activities?
If they’re actually optimizing, you should be able to see the results, though measuring them is another problem in itself.
If I was sensible, I probably should stop playing Magic, or at least paying money for cards… but I have too much of my self-esteem wrapped up in that stupid game. It’s like trying to quit smoking. :P
I don’t know if it’s a consequentialism issue, but “if I was sensible” seems like a way of locking a problem in place.
Maybe there should be a separate category for noticing identity issues.
This is why I tend to have an immediate aversion to using Magic as a rationality teacher. The whole game is set up on a business model that incentivizes constantly shelling out money for new cards to keep your deck from becoming obsolete. Wizards Of The Coast’s goal is to make sure that their players cannot continue to be competitive without providing a constant revenue flow. If you want to teach people good rationality skills, don’t start by encouraging them to get into something like that.
I’ve always been turned off my MtG on the grounds that I should just be able to print up any cards I like and use them as long as they form a valid deck, rather than having to follow WotC’s anti-”counterfeiting” policy. Do any Magic players actually do this?
People create “proxy” decks all the time. It’s one of the dominant ways of testing for big tournaments (when you don’t know what cards you’ll need until you settle on a decklist, but you don’t want to buy every potential card). However, for some reason the casual community doesn’t seem to do this as much. This is somewhat ironic because sanctioned tournaments are the only place you have to use real cards.
I have friends who did so, but they only used them to compose special print decks to play with the few other friends who were also using print decks, and I think they used their “real” decks more even among each other than the print decks.
Careful, there: some vindictiveness (“if you attack me in Africa despite our pact, I will go totally apeshit on you for the rest of the game”) is an essential part of playing e.g. Risk well (in our group) - naive consequentialism (“looks like I lost Africa, taking Australia from (unrelated player) seems best now”) does not work very well on intelligent and adversarial agents.
Of course, most of the world is not an intelligent and adversarial agent—pre-committing to going totally apeshit on an unthinking animal is just stupid. The easiest and biggest wins for consequentialism are there, not in games of Risk.
(Non-naive consequentialism works fine. Naive consequentialism probably works fine in many games, e.g. two-player games like Magic.)
Totally agree. I’m ruthlessly vindictive but perfectly trustworthy (meaning I refrain from making promises I do not keep) when it comes to strategic situations like that. It looks superficially like being completely unsophisticated but it works.
Lost Cities might work, if you took your time and tried to make the optimal play every move. I think you can make it work with playing cards.