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Short-term, long-term in selection games
Natural Hazard prompts in the Pfeilstorch server: “The biggest problem with misrepresenting who you are in dating is that you might succeed.” Generalized: “The biggest reason to not strategically misrepresent yourself in a selection game is that you might succeed.” What properties of a selection game determine if or when this is good advice? Selection…
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Adaptation ripples in the NBA
Last time: Bateson was very interested in nontransitive comparisons, possibly because they subvert the commonsense transitivity of hierarchy and dominance which in many cases we read into the data because of our expectations. We rank sports teams for a winner at the end of the season, yet this final ranking aggregates a lot of non-transitivity…
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All Is Well E28: “My Hands Are Tied”
This is the eighth installment in a ten-part series. Timestamped link to clip under discussion, beginning 16:05 in. Su Mingyu has recently been released from the hospital after an assault by her brother, Mingcheng. Now, as the right-hand man of President Meng—head of her consulting firm—she has been assigned to do Meng’s dirty work, firing…
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All Is Well E28: Functional Railroading
This is the seventh installment in a ten-part series. Timestamped link to clip under discussion, beginning 5:30 in. Shi Tiandong, love interest of protagonist Su Mingyu, is sitting in the restaurant he owns across from Su Daqiang, her father. Daqiang has been living, after the death of his wife, with his second son Su Mingcheng.…
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Value Clarity 2.0
C. Thi Nguyen’s “value clarity” concept (advanced in 2020’s Games: Agency as Art) is a useful one, whose basic idea goes like this: Nguyen believes games “work” (compel us) largely by providing value clarity for their players—that is, game worlds are characterized by artificially narrow and unambiguous set of priorities and purposes over which the…
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Baselines for the would-be strategist
There’s a set of strategy maxims that get passed around Pentagon powerpoints, Greek history textbooks, and business school seminars which can be considered platitudes of the field. I think they probably boil down to about a dozen guidelines—I’ve gotten them down to fifteen here, but think good synthetic work could manage single digits. Don’t tilt…
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A landscape of communication
This is the sixth installment in a ten-part series. Sure, we can bite the bullet that communication is manipulation—but what does that actually look like? We’ll time-travel to the early 2000s, check out a day in Spendo’s life circa elementary and middle school, narrating the day as a series of communications. What is important to…
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Response to Simpolism on ACiM
This is the fifth installment in a ten-part series. Simpolism has kindly written two posts in response to my own recent barrage—the first, “Is Communication ‘Manipulation’?” investigates his gut reaction to the idea that in communicating, he might manipulate others; the second, “On Behavioral Hermeneutics,” tries to figure out what kind of claim ACiM is.…
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ACiM is a natural extension of cybernetic theory
This is the fourth installment in a ten-part series. At the core of cybernetics is the idea of agents—synthetic and organic, human and machine and animal—as servomechanisms, or “servos.” Servos are machines which use feedback to correct their actions, using some sort of sensory system and built-in encoder to monitor their environment, and ensure their…
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All Communication is Behavioral Manipulation
This is the second installment in a ten-part series. I want to establish, from the get-go, the uncontroversial, borderline tautological aspect of what I mean when I say “All communication is manipulation.” As a recap on what I mean by “manipulation,” I define the word as “the alteration of an agent’s behavior.” When we sum…