Dominion Strategy Forum
Miscellaneous => Forum Games => Mafia Game Threads => Topic started by: ashersky on May 28, 2014, 09:41:20 am
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RSPers,
As part of a forum mafia game, we are having a debate!
Delirious Deleuze will argue for the subject.
chairs will argue against the subject.
Each player will make one, and only one, post for their argument. Afterward, I will open a poll for anyone to vote.
Thanks!
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Can't you keep the mafia stuff on the mafia board?
Man... forum games is a part of this community. Time to get used to it. The only reason I frequent this site--and continue to participate in dominion stuff--is because of the forum games and I know that is the same for a lot of other people. Two posts in RSP isn't going to ruin anyone's day... or at least it shouldn't. This whole forum is for doing fun stuff. This is something fun. Don't turn it into something bigger than what it is.
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Join the dark side, Peebles. It is... your destiny.
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While I agree with yuma's sentiment (I also frequent the site now primarily for forum games), I think in this case I agree with SirPeebles - I'm not sure why this isn't in the forum games section. Maybe if the debate was about something non-Mafia-related that would make sense as a way to get more people to vote, but as it's about the game of Mafia, surely the best place to post it would be where it'll primarily be read by people who actually play Mafia?
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Yeah, I think Ash's idea was to have everyone able to vote, but since the topics of debate are only Mafia, only the Mafia people are going to look at them.
But maybe the later subjects will be on different topics? I think he's intending to do three rounds.
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I agree with SirPeebles that there are other boards better suited for these debates. The Mafia Game Threads, the Forum Games, or even General Discussion seem like a better fit (the last one being the only that counts posts and respect, as far as I know).
Not like I really mind, since nobody forces me to read this thread, and I might read it anyway. But I am surprised by the choice all the same.
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Mafia 43: Debate 1.3 (Sir Peebles vs. Yuma): Mafia Debates should take place in the Mafia Games forum.
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Vote: XP
Trying to force a mislynch between two clearly townie players.
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/tag
I agree this would be better in the mafia forum, maybe with a post in random stuff advertising that you want people to check it out and vote.
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Moved to Forum Games.
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/tag
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/tag
DeDe are you going to give us your Hunter S. Thompson pastiche for this?
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yay, i'm tagging.
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/tag
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/tag
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/tag
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Posting deadline for debaters is 24 hours from thread creation.
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The reasoning for inclusion in RSP is the (tongue-in-cheek) contentious nature of the topics, which is the reason for the RSP board.
Future rounds will be worse, which was why I started it there. I figured best to be there instead of being reported and moved there afterward...
Also, to get full visibility for voting. Oh well. Just makes for a less exciting challenge.
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tag
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To begin,
1. Are ICs able to get the prizes to this challenge seeing as they have a debate team?
2. And If I lose, will they be able to go forward and win the challenge and make no one get the prize if they win the whole thing?
If the first is yes, then only read the following as my argument:
It's fun to random lynch, so vote for me. I'd also rather have the ICs have prizes seeing as I know they're town.
If the first is answer is not yes, but the answer to the second question is yes, then only read the following as my argument:
Do the ICs think that it'd be better for no one to have the prize in fear of scum getting it?
If the answer is yes, then only read the following as my argument:[/b]
It's fun to random lynch, so vote for me. I'd also rather be safe and have no one get the prize if the ICs agree.
If the answer is no, then only read the following argument. You can also read for fun how'd I'd actually debate this, being a national debater:
First, Theory
Responding Directly is Bad
Interpretation: Both sides cannot directly refer to the others' post when arguing.
Reasons to prefer this interpretation of the scare game:
a. Reciprocity: If you allow them to respond directly to my arguments, they'll be able to respond to everything I say and add more, without me being able to refute their arguments or responses to my arguments because I already posted. This allows them an unfair advantage. The only way to remedy this is to allow neither of us to directly respond to the others' arguments.
b. Ground: Allowing them to respond to my posts gives them more ground for this debate, inherently making it impossible to win if we go first. They'll have an infinite number of arguments to refute mine, while still being able to go beyond my pre-emptive arguments.
c. Fairness: Unless you're going to allow me a response to their post (which isn't allowed in the actual rules) they're at an unfair advantage and this makes the games a rigged game. This is an independent reason to vote for me if they try to get this unfair advantage, or at the very best disregard their arguments.
Next, Topicality, or How We Should View This Debate
Given the resolution, a random lynch on D1 is the best practice, we must have:
1. Our interpretation:
Resolved means haphazard course or selection process
Merriam Websters 2014 [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/random, JCook.]
ran·dom noun \ˈran-dəm\ : a haphazard course — at random : without definite aim, direction, rule, or method <subjects chosen at random>
2. Prefer this to interpretation to other interpretations that would mean the lynch is “at random” which is distinctly different as provided in the Merriam Webster evidence:
a. Predictable Ground: The alternative interpretation would force me to debate in favor of a totally at random lynch, rather than a haphazard method of selection. This ensures I would lose because they can always say that having a little insight, like not lynching ICs is good. The only fair way to have this debate is to debate whether a random lynch in the sense of haphazard lynches with less evidence on D1 is best. This provides ground on both sides allowing us to have an educational debate that applies to real life mafia games.
b. Applicability: Framing the debate around a more haphazard vote on D1 vs. a more secure and conservative vote allows us to truly debate a question that can be applied to mafia games, ensuring a realistic and topical debate that furthers the education of viewers and debaters alike for when they play mafia. This is not just a game, this is a discussion about the best methods for town to play mafia.
c. Games’ Intent: This debate should be about real issues in mafia, not a meaningless weighted question. This is key to fairness in the games and provides more education for people involved.
d. Critical Thinking: This interpretation forces us debaters to critically think about mafia as its played rather than a hypothetical realm of complete randomness vs. certainty – This provides better benefits for all involved.
e. Second Poster Side Bias: They’re posting second, which inherently gives them an upperhand in this debate. The only way to level the playing field is to prefer a more fair interpretation of the question that we’re debating.
Next, Defense
a. Try or Die: The voting process we use on D1 is inevitably haphazard in some form. As a result of this, they can gain no unique offense on this question. At the very best we can hope that even though the method is semi-flawed, that it will provide a benefit for town rather than being conservative (see topicality). That means there is only the chance of a unique benefit by allowing for a random vote D1.
b. Information: Even if a lynch is inherently haphazard, it allows us to gain information through interactions. This information will allow town to analyze the posts from D1 to find scum D2. This is essential to town victories.
c. The Flip: Once a player is flipped, we are able to gain more information to aid in PoE in combination with post interactions. This is unique to a lynch that may even be wrong, and thus is better for town.
d. Information Outweighs Certainty: Although this seems intuitively opposite to the truth, we have to weigh this question in terms of inherency. If we disregard a lynch because we aren’t certain and the process was too haphazard, that world would provide us with less information, because we didn’t have a flip. This uncertainty of the flip and thus no haphazard lynch means we get less information and miss out on the chance of hitting scum or analyzing posts. This hurts town.
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A mislynch on D1 is offset by the information we gain. Even a mislynch provides several pieces of evidence for town:
i. We can analyze who pushed the lynch. Scum often push mislynches.
ii. Who was white knighting the mislynchee.
iii. How wagons change.
iv. Scum reads from different players on each other.
v. Interactions with the mislynchee and specific players.
vi. People who were on the wagon of the mislychee and how those players interacted with other wagons, and with questions of process in the game set up.
e. Certainty Leads to Paralysis: I’ll extrapolate more on the offense section, but desiring certainty in a lynch rather than accepting the haphazard process of D1 ensures less information, because there is almost never enough information to be certain of the lynch D1.
Next, Offense
Criticism of Certainty and Security
Their rejection of chaos, randomness, and haphazard uncertainty constructs an unreal perfect world for mafia in which they oppose actual reality – this engenders ressentiment towards life and action in the game. No longer will people want to find scum, hunt, or even post in fear of 1. Being wrong – AND – 2. Being called on it and thus lynched. They blame the chaos that is a part of this game inherently, and try to eradicate it. This leads to paralysis and hurts our attempts to find scum and certainty in general
Saurette ‘96
Paul Saurette, PhD in political theory at John Hopkins U, in 96 "I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them': Nietzshce, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in INternational Relations Theory." Millenium Journal of International Studies. Vol. 25 no. 1 page 3-6
The Will to Order and Politics-as-Making The Philosophical Foundation of the Will to Truth/Order •. I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. A will to a system is a lack .of ! integrity."
According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give meaning to the phenomenon of human existence within a given cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to , meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a particular community.5 Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of the most basic philosophical foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the origins of values which we take to be intrinsic and natural. Nietzsche suggests, .therefore, that to understand the development of our modem conception of society and politics, we must reconsider the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of Socratic thought. Nietzsche claims that pre-Socratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life on heroic myths which honoured tragedy and k competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the joyful and ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian) aspects of life were accepted and .affirmed as inescapable aspects of human existence.6 However, this •incarnation of the will to power as tragedy weakened, and became unable to sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the self-respect and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. -Everywhere the : instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were.but five steps from excess: the monstrum-in-animo was a universal danger’. No longer willing to accept the tragic hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic myth, Greek thought yielded to decadence, a search for a new social foundation which would soften the tragedy of life, while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates' thought became paramount. In the words of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end—And Socrates understood that the world had need of him —his expedient, his cure and his personal art of self-preservation. Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual standard paralleled the widespread yearning for assurance and stability within society. His expedient, his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that promised mastery and control not through acceptance of the tragic life, but through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent, and the problematic. In response to the failing power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to renounce the very experience that had given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. In Nietzsche's words, '[rationality was divined as a saviour...it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational....'9 Thus, Socrates codified the wider fear of instability into an intellectual framework. The Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and order life rationally by renouncing the Dionysian elements of existence and privileging an idealised Apollonian order. As life is inescapably comprised of both order and disorder however, the promise of control through Socratic reason is only possible by creating a 'Real World* of eternal and meaningful forms, in opposition to an 'Apparent World of transitory physical existence. Suffering and contingency is contained within the Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and^ ignored in relation to the ideal order of the Real World. Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between the experience of Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and the idealised order of the Real World. According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the emergence of a uniquely 'modern'10 understanding of life which could only view suffering as the result of the imperfection of the Apparent World. This outlook created a modern notion of responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life could be understood only as a phenomenon for which someone, or something is to blame. Nietzsche terms this philosophically-induced condition ressentiment. and argues that it signalled a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by exposing the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution. This contradiction, however, was resolved historically through the aggressive universalisation of the Socratic ideal by Christianity. According to Nietzsche,' ascetic Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the Apparent World as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life could be turned. Blame for suffering fell on individuals within the Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the Real World, As Nietzsche wrote, ‘I suffer: someone must be to blame for it’ thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: ‘Quite so my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,-you alone are to blame for yourself '-This is brazen and.false enough: but one thing, is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered." Faced, with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the prospect of meaninglessness, once again, 'one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational.... '12 The genius of the ascetic ideal was that it preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by extrapolating ad absurdiuin the Socratic division through the redirection of ressentiment against the Apparent World! Through this redirection, the Real World was transformed from a transcendental world of philosophical escape into a model towards which the Apparent World actively aspired, always blaming its contradictory experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action. This subtle transformation of the relationship between the dichotomised worlds creates the .Will to Order as the defining characteristic of the modern Will to Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the Apparent World, the ascetic ressentiment desperately searches for 'the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose of deepest. sleep, in short absence of suffering According to the ascetic model, however, this escape is possible only when the Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The Will to Order, then, is the aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the precepts of the moral-Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment of the Will to Order, therefore, generates two interrelated reactions. First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the Apparent World in accordance with the dictates of the ideal Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve this," however, the ascetic ideal also asserts that a 'truer', more complete knowledge of the Real World must be established creating an ever-increasing Will-to Truth. This self-perpetuating movement creates an interpretative structure within which everything must be understood and ordered in relation to the ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche suggests, [t]he ascetic ideal has a goal—this goal is so universal that all other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation.''1 The very structure of the Will to Truth ensures that theoretical investigation must be increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer to the perfection of the ideal. At the same time, this understanding of intellectual theory ensures that it creates practices which attempt to impose increasing order in the Apparent World. With this critical transformation, the Will to Order becomes .the fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.
Risk of being wrong and uncertainty are inherently inevitable in this game – their fear of being wrong and not certain robs them of everything that drives us to find scum. This creates an atmosphere in the game that attacks people who try to openly find scum, because of the fear they’re wrong. This paralysis destroys the game and our ability to get information.
Der Derian ‘93
James Der Derian, 93 professor of political science at the U Massachusetts-Amherst and prof of IR at Brown 93
"The political subject of violence" ed. David Campbell and Michael Dillon, p 101-105
Nietzsche and Interpretive Realism In the last analysis, "love of the neighbor" is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary—illusory in relation to fear of the neigh-bor. After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbcss and Marx's interpretations of securi-ty through a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fiaional identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and to affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future.33 Originating in the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief, the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of life, the terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others—who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his reinterprctation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power: "Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the most frequent results."34 The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings—including self-preservation—are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life, for "... life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of ones own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation—but why should one always use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages."35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.” But the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a con-sensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference—that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the reader "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubi lation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restora-tion of a sense of security?**37 The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative pro-duces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols-. The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?*1 shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause—a cause (hat is comforting, liber-ating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but tor a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation—that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences."39 The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god."40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error, in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something 10 be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its »4l causes. Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The Gencalo gy of Morals, Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to ones ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplish-ments of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their contin-ued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength/2 Sacrifices, honors, obedience arc given but it is never enough, for The ancestors of the most powerful tribts are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god.4i As the ancestors debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today), one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and hostile acts to which the man outside, the "man without peace," is exposed . . . since one has bound and pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44 The establishment of the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by written treaty, however, and distant gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective resentment. The result? The fear of the external other is transvalued into the "love of the neighbor" quoted in the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness, generates the values which uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security: - My rights - are that pan of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they sec in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power. Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions that created the security imperative—and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it—have diminished if not disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousncss, and docs so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security. Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation."46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox—all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions: Of future virtues—How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic clement of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead tor mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With the diminution of our fearrulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fiarsomeness, not also diminished?47 It is of course in Nietzsche's lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age. Dismissive of Utopian engineering, Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward only so far as to sight the emergence of "new philosophers" (such as himself?) who would restore a reverence for fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-Socratic era to find the exemplars for a new kind of securi iv. In The Genealogy of Morals^ he holds up Pericles as an example, for lauding the Athenians for their "rhatbymia"—a term that incorporates the notion of "indifference to and contempt for security."48 It is perhaps too much to expect Nietzsche's message to resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most uncertain and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a stimulus for improvement rather than cause for retrenchment. Yet Nietzsche would clearly see these as opportune times, when fear could be willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of difference, rather than canalized into a cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks and benefits.
The singular event of the diceroll contains all of determination in destiny but throws it to chance in a capricious act of life’s affirmation. This act precedes life as an act of contingency.
Deleuze ‘83
[Gilles Deleuze, Yes the guy I’m named after, “Nietzsche and Philosophy”, the section titled ‘The Dicethrow’, p. 29-30 on, I believe, the English translation, JCook.]
Whereas the thrown dice affirm chance once and for all, the dice which fall back necessarily affirm the number or the destiny which brings the dice back. It is in this sense that the second moment of the game is also the two moments together or the player who equals the whole. The eternal return is the second moment, the result of the dicethrow, the affirmation of necessity, the number which brings together all the parts of chance. But it is also the return of the first moment, the repetition of the dicethrow, the reproduction and reaffirmation of chance itself. Destiny in the eternal return is also the “welcoming” of chance, “I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it is quite cooked do I welcome it as my food. And truly, many a chance came imperiously to me; but my will spoke to it even more imperiously, then it went down imploringly on its knees - imploring shelter and love with me, urging in wheedling tones; ‘Just see, 0 Zarathustra, how a friend comes to a friend!’ “(Z III “Of the Virtue that makes small” 3 p. 191). This means that there are fragments of chance which claim to be valid in themselves, they appeal to their probability, each solicits several throws of the dice from the player; divided among several throws, having become simple probabilities, the fragments of chance are slaves who want to speak as masters.24 But Zarathustra knows that one must not play or let oneself be played, on the contrary, it is necessary to affirm the whole of chance at once (therefore boil and cook it like the player who warms the dice in his hands), in order to reunite all its fragments and to affirm the number which is not probable but fatal and necessary. Only then is chance a friend who visits a friend, a friend who will be asked back, a friend of destiny whose destiny itself assures the eternal return as such.
Their side is a fantasy of a perfect world, without any mislynching or scum having say. They want so badly to get there, but they can’t. This locks them into hatred of anything uncertain, because they can’t ever get what they want. They’ll always find something to fix, which means they’ll always have something to hate, they’ll always be scumhunting and mislyching people who don’t fit their system – Literally look at previous games. People don’t fit their “norm” or “secure” way of proceding and they’re automatically labeled scum. How many times have we mislyched Xerxes or Jimm?!
Five arguments you look to before anything else:
1. Undesirable aspects of lynching are inevitable – two implications
a. Their logic of “just this one instance” creates an infinite spiral, because their reintervention recreates the causes for the needs of intervention. This makes them continually hold the process of lynching in contempt, engendering ressentiment in themselves towards anybody actually trying to find scum – That’s Der Derian
b. Their impacts are all inevitable anyway. Lynching is imperfect even if we pursue certainty – That’s Saurette
2. The only reason their truth claims exist is the ressentiment produced by the perpetuated need to scapegoat and blame people who are uncertain – that’s Der Derian ’93. This means their impacts and risks are at the very best suspect, and at the very worst, counterproductive
3. Embracing seemingly random lynches allows us to escape this model while simultaneously gaining information which helps our methods of finding scum improve.
4. The only thing you evaluate in the round is ressentiment towards uncertainty. If we constantly hate people who are, in some ways, haphazardly in voting, we will inevitably just vote for people who are trying to find scum and mislynch anyway.
tl:dr for the philosophy: Their attempts at certainty and using that as a model for mafia creates a game atmosphere that makes us completely wary of all lynches. People will stop creating wagons for fear they’re wrong and people will vote for people who do. This causes paralysis and kills our ability for town to win. Also, uncertainty and haphazard lynches are inevitable D1.
Less Philosophy from Here on Out, Now, Paralysis
Fear of a mislynch or haphazard lynches on D1 creates a paralysis in voting. This is bad for two easy reasons:
a. It stops town from gaining information on the flip and from reads on peoples’ posts in D1 in relation to the flip – I did all this analysis on the defense part as to why this is worse than a mislynch.
b. Scum can abuse this. They can play on our uncertainty and fear of a mislynch to make us not lynch anyone. Literally look at what happened in day 3 of this game, we missed the deadline and mail-mi didn’t get lynched and now we lose that information we could have gained. Now imagine that scenario in D1! We would have to restart in D2. That allows scum an extra day to kill people at night. At the very best that outweighs the possibility of a mislynch, by assuring a scum kill at night and not providing town any info from a day lynch.
/tag
DeDe are you going to give us your Hunter S. Thompson pastiche for this?
No, sadly. On the Brightside, this resolution isn’t inherently neo-colonialist in it’s pedagogy!!!
For reference, this is the argument we read at nationals this weekend. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zi3qo8k0in4feci/Fear%20and%20Loathing%20at%20CFLs.docx)
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tl;dr
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Can't answer prize/IC questions.
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I may not be a national debater, and I too am curious about the prize/IC questions presented (though my suspicion is "if ICs win the prize we get no prize at all"), but I'll put forth the argument that came to me throughout the day.
When I think of "random lynch", in this context, I think my opponent and I can agree that there are a few ways to view the term "random". Does one mean "pick a name out of a proverbial hat for all potential lynchees" (excluding, for example, ICs in this case)? This, I believe we can both agree, is a bad course. I'd like to argue that a long D1, including a Random Voting Stage, a reaction stage, and ultimately a stage with 2 or more competing wagons leading to a lynch is both sufficiently non-random as to not be considered a "random" lynch as well as sufficiently useful to be better than even a lynch based mostly in randomness.
The first stage of any D1 will be filled with two things, particularly in Open Setups:
1) Random Voting Stage, where votes are bandied about with wild abandon, in an attempt to start the reaction-provoking stage
2) Theory discussion, where players will attempt to break (or appear to break) the setup in an attempt to provide their side the advantage by suggesting a course of action for the Town.
I'll argue that 1 is mildly useful, but only in that it gets us to the second stage of D1 (where we start to vote more seriously and focus on reactions). I'll get to why the reaction stage is where things start to coalesce from a voting perspective when I discuss that stage. I would like to dwell for a moment, however, on theory discussion:
It is my contention that this community is deeply divided on theory discussion. Barring an opportunity to "break" the setup (e.g. 1 cop 1 doctor 3 goons X VTs, where you can "follow the cop"), theory discussion can be beneficial in providing some interesting ways to shape how the scum team(s) function, but it also provides a lot of opportunity for the scum team(s) to be "helpful" to Town without having to resort to casting votes, which will generally form the basis of our reads in later Days. Still, this poster believes that in most open/semi-open setups, it is to Town benefit to at least have some brief discussion regarding any opportunity to form Town advantage. I argue this is also an interesting moment to garner reads, particularly in setups that are, in fact, at least semi-breakable - we've seen a number of games where scum has been forced to argue that the plan that breaks the setup (at least in some way) is "too complex" or try to muddy the waters on such a setup. Thus, to summarize, I believe that RVS has its advantage in generating a mechanism to move to a non-RVS voting stage, and theory has its role in further generating reread opportunities.
I'll move on to stage 2 of D1 - reaction/wagon-building stage. I believe that stage 2 is where someone has (or claims to have) glimpsed sufficient data that they feel confident that their vote is on someone who is more likely than the average to be scum. This is where rereads of D1 will start to focus. Every vote in this stage is crucial, and arguably the lack of "solid data" means that this can be where you will find scum voting each other early and often as typically the first or second wagon to coalesce in this stage will not lead to stage 3 of D1, instead leading to that wagon dissipating and that person frequently not being suspected on later Days barring some other argument to bring them up. There are scum who have purposely attempted to get a wagon rolling on one of their members early in D1 for just such a reason. Regardless, these mid-D1 votes are excellent re-read data as Town and scum alike explain the logic of their minimal-info votes.
Stage 3 is where rubber meets road. At this point, generally D1 is drawing towards a close, with only 2-3 RL days in play (based on our average game Day length) and two or sometimes three wagons have formed. Watching who is pushing towards which wagon and why is a time-tested way to (in conjunction with other data) identify scum, particularly after one of their team has been discovered via lynch or some other method. It's critical as Town to cast your votes here carefully and to ensure that a vote IS cast, with a reason as to why you ultimately decided on one wagon over another - this forces scum to do the same or be caught out as the ones who didn't voice an opinion (which, again, is crucial reread data).
tl;dr lynching at random or even semi-random is not as beneficial to later Day rereads as posting with votes that are joined by reasons for each vote (no matter how thin the reason must be, given the minimal information on D1), therefore lynching based on as much reason and logic as possible is best for Town.
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Thanks to the debaters. The thread will lock for 24 hours and a poll will go up.
After the voting period ends, the thread will reopen for discussion as desired.
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Thread unlocked to all.
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tl;dr
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It's sort of hard to evaluate because I don't think DD and Chairs took up contradictory positions.
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Am I even allowed to discuss in here? I am not in this game. Feel free to ignore the following in case of a negative answer.
Aren't they actually defending the same position? To me it kinda looked like:
DD: I am going first, which is a disadvantage, so I'll compensate by tweaking the question; a random lynch is actually not that random when you think about it, so it's good and better than no lynch.
Chairs: random lynch is bad, it's much better to do an informed lynch, although I concede that a lynch in D1 is actually not that informed and basically just gives more info for the "real" lynches in later days.
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Did somebody tried to do statistic of D1 lynch success rate? I would not be much surprised if choosing D1 at random would have better probability of catching scum.
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Did somebody tried to do statistic of D1 lynch success rate? I would not be much surprised if choosing D1 at random would have better probability of catching scum.
Not exactly, but we have kept stats in general. Here are all the games where scum (mafia) was lynched successfully day1.
Just pulled the data on this...
Excluding Blitz and RMM games:
Lynched Scum Day1 Town Won?
MXI - Grujah Yes
MXV - Galz (SK) Yes
MXVII - Lekkit Yes
MXXII - Kooshie No
MXXIV - Winterspartan Yes
MXXVIII - chairs Yes
MXXX - mail-mi Yes
MXXXII - sudgy (SK) Yes
MXXXIX - raerae Yes
So we have 9 scum lynched (7 mafia and 2 SK) with only 1 scum team pulling out the victory in the end.
Keep in mind that we have played about 40 games up to the points where the stats are through and none of them used a random lynch (except for one blitz game that was excluded because blitz games are a very different animal). So only 9 out of 40 (roughly about 25%). so about 1/4. Given that regular games use 2/9 (22%) or 3-4/13 (23% and 30%) scum in town I would say that we do pretty good compared to random lynches + get the bonus of having information from it that you wouldn't get from a random lynch except who was in favor of random lynching.
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Can I get some context on how these debates factor into Mafia 43? From a skim of the opening posts, I'm getting:
- all players are divided into 3 neighborhoods
- neighborhoods will sometimes compete in mini-games/challenges, with rewards to the winner
I take it that this series of debates is one such challenge. But how do these challenges factor into the overall game, considering that the neighborhoods do not match up with in-game alignment? Perhaps the prizes generally help out townies in the winning neighborhood, so scum may try to throw the match (and there can be discussion on how earnestly a player tried to win)?
Very curious about how this set up works, but I am too lazy to read through the thread in-depth. I'd love a short summary or something. Maybe by PM if this can't be discussed, given that the game is on-going.
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There are contests each night, with the winning house receiving a prize. The effect of the prize is sometimes known. Effect on the game varies per prize.
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Am I even allowed to discuss in here? I am not in this game. Feel free to ignore the following in case of a negative answer.
Aren't they actually defending the same position? To me it kinda looked like:
DD: I am going first, which is a disadvantage, so I'll compensate by tweaking the question; a random lynch is actually not that random when you think about it, so it's good and better than no lynch.
Chairs: random lynch is bad, it's much better to do an informed lynch, although I concede that a lynch in D1 is actually not that informed and basically just gives more info for the "real" lynches in later days.
It bothered me that DD started by saying "here's an argument that says the other person can't respond to me"...and then added a section that was the "offensive". If this was to be believed, then DD could respond to any arguments chairs could theoretically before they came up, but prevented chairs from responding to anything DD actually did bring up. That and the topicality debate was pure nonsense. That sort of stuff turned me off to policy debate. There is actual ground from which to argue that random D1 lynches (as mafia-people and not dictionaries define them) are good. But instead, the ground was shifted to something else, and focused purely on debate tricks.
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Subjectively speaking, I am very much against random D1 lynch. Objectively, I think that it's possible to argue for it though.
First, to define the term -- a random lynch is one that is not based on anything else. No specific info, no tells, no reads, no theory based on the known game setup. Purely random, with the exception of completely obvious things to account for like "don't lynch the IC".
If I had to argue for random D1 lynch in a debate, I would try to argue that the alternative is worse (obviously).
At the start of the game, there is precious little information. Barring obvious scum slips, any scummy behaviour could just as easily be day 1 jitters or even a simple difference in play style. I prefer to sit back and watch whereas others may be more aggressive. Either action could be spun as scummy -- laying low is trying to avoid attention! Aggression is just trying to push for a quick mislynch!
Trying to make sense of player actions before the first lynch and night phase is a wild goose chase. Worse, the scum have far more information than the townies at this point of the game, which in turn can give them a lot of control. Scum partner under fire? Nudge the focus towards somebody else. Townies getting angry at each other for no reason? Grab some popcorn. But scum can't defend against a random lynch.
But doesn't that mean we won't have any useful information from D1? Not necessarily. You can still do the usual D1 discussion, finger-pointing, nit-picking and wagoning. Even if these things don't ultimately lead to a lynch, they still have meaning. Sending somebody to L-1 is still pretty big, especially with certain hammer-happy players. And then you'll also have night actions to consider, which can account for a lot depending on the setup.
My actual opinion is that you can always do better than random. You might be able to glean some info out of a random lynch, but you get much, much more when you let players find reason from the madness.
I think the records show that d1 lynches in f.ds actually have a higher success rate than pure random (in an actual debate, I would go check). But even if that isn't true, there is just so much more weight to every action when the final result isn't random. Knowing that a dice roll will determine the lynchee actively disengages players who no longer feel the need to criticize every little thing that others write.
Scum can try to manipulate the d1 lynch result by turning attention and breeding conflict, but these actions can be uncovered and dissected in subsequent days.
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It bothered me that DD started by saying "here's an argument that says the other person can't respond to me"...and then added a section that was the "offensive". If this was to be believed, then DD could respond to any arguments chairs could theoretically before they came up, but prevented chairs from responding to anything DD actually did bring up. That and the topicality debate was pure nonsense. That sort of stuff turned me off to policy debate. There is actual ground from which to argue that random D1 lynches (as mafia-people and not dictionaries define them) are good. But instead, the ground was shifted to something else, and focused purely on debate tricks.
I understood that as DD asking Chairs not to read his argument before writing down his for the sake of fairness, which seemed like a reasonable thing to ask. The part about topicality got me head-scratching though.