“The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson | Hacker News Reader

“The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson

economist.com

154 pointshelsinkiandrew138 comments

The worrying observation I make from Traitors is how easily a group of about a dozen people can become so sure of guilt on so little evidence, and time after time of being knowingly wrong. What if anything can we learn from this to understand the jury system and prosecutorial process?

Also, I have watched a bunch of series and I have not once noticed anyone click the obvious “hack”: the last person to enter the breakfast room after a kill night is almost always a faithful, because of the TV cliffhanger of viewers hanging on which of two faithful survived. It’s the best truth signal the game gives and I’ve never seen a player mention it. Maybe TV edits the knowledge out.

“Almost always”. If the entries were completely randomised this would still be the case, since the murdered are always faithful and the majority of the remaining are faithful. There could well be some production bias but it’s not the cheat code you’re making it to be. Traitors can and will enter last.

I don't think they have entered last in the current UK series so far have they?

It's pretty rare, like any guessing game there are advantages and on the whole traitors entering last as I believe happened less often than the percentage of traitors to faithfuls would allow if it was randomised.

I do wonder how much meta gaming is going on though. As a faithful, given that new traitors are recruited, your goal isn't actually to eliminate a traitor but to survive, ideally knowing who the remaining the traitors are at the end (and making sure they don't end up in a majority at any point too). If you are confident that somebody is a traitor, there is something to be said for keeping them as a traitor so you know who the traitors are at the end.

I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished. It is quite scary how they latch onto tiny things and become convinced. I suspect that as soon as the faithful feel they are being targeted, they feel pressured and act in ways that reinforce everybody's ideas about them. Defensiveness gets interpreted as guilt very easily.

It's really hard to know whether this transfers to the jury system. It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences. To me juries feel like the 'least worst' way to make such decisions and you do need to be unanimous or extremely close to unanimous if the judge gives permission for that.

I wondered about the order of entry at breakfast too, but I've read that they film the scene in multiple permutations so they can't just figure it out from that. I don't know if that is accurate that film different permutations, but I find it hard to believe that nobody has cottoned on to the idea that the last couple of people in are faithful.

> latch onto tiny things

I think most people has a very low capacity for living with uncertainty. They much rather believe something random, e.g. whatever religion (or conspiracy theory) at hand, than admit that they can't know.

Uncertainty is demanding as it requires you to look at things from multiple angles/reasons and evaluate all options. It is much cheaper to just select a default reason. This is especially true for creating social cohesion in a group.

This. For all of the hate the rationalist movement gets they’re effectively teaching people to be comfortable with uncertainty. It worked for me- I don’t consider myself a rationalist, but do feel comfortable noticing “I’m not sure about this because I have limited evidence- which is the right way to feel about it.”

To be fair, the “how to deal with your many cognitive biases” part is not what the rationalist movement is generally hated on.

> what the rationalist movement is generally hated on

Out of genuine curiosity, what causes hatred/resentment towards this community?

They are accused of being basically a doomsday cult for intellectuals with an extreme fanatical focus on AI doomerism.

They also have a huge number of really unusual social norms including using their own ultra nerdy lingo with lots of obscure fiction references in regular life, widespread polyamory - and often vocal disapproval of monogamy, outspoken rejection of sexual norms including group sex parties and raising kids communally in polyamorous group homes, rejection of all political correctness, and willingness to discuss normally taboo topics in casual conversation.

In a lot of ways it reminds me of the beatniks- they're basically throwing out all of the existing culture, and trying to create something entirely new by trial and error, sometimes with quite bad results.

I've learned an awful lot of good ideas from the community that I've applied directly in my career as a scientist, and attended a few events in person, but personally wasn't able to connect with the people, I always felt like an outsider and I also found a lot of their blatant rejection and reinvention of virtually all social norms somewhat disturbing in person. There are also a lot of really kind, open minded, and brilliant people in the community- and I personally think most of their concerns over AI are well founded, but not everyone agrees.

It sounds like your primary critique here is that "rationalist" communities overlap in membership with other communities that have other, not strictly related, inclinations. That may be so, but I'm not sure it's relevant -- if a bowling league's membership consists primarily of Mormons, I still wouldn't interpret criticism of Mormon theology as being relevant to discussions of bowling.

I wouldn't characterize the rationalists as just a loose knit online community with a common interest in rational thinking that happen to overlap with some other unusual interests- but as a real life community and culture - centered around a particular group of people mostly in the Northern California "East Bay Area" with a very unusual lifestyle and social norms they've collectively invented within the movement, that includes all of what I mentioned as central aspects. It's a broad social experiment of trying to reinvent everything "rationally" instead of just doing what their culture or parents taught them.

See for example: https://putanumonit.com/2019/10/16/polyamory-is-rational/ "The Rationalist community isn’t just a sex cult, they do other great things too!"

I find that post hilarious, because the polling your friends and doing statistics on it thing is even more stereotypically rationalist than polyamory itself, but they conclude from poll data that most of the rationalists came to polyamory from within the movement itself, not from an existing or outside interest in it.

There is a larger international group of people that participate remotely and don't relocate or adopt the full lifestyle, but it would be a mistake to think of that as something that exists entirely separately, or would exist at all without that core community.

I'm confused then -- if you aren't construing the larger community of people following these ideas and participating remotely as being separate from the "core" group, then how do the more unusual lifestyles that only the "core" group follow describe the entirety of it?

The way you're describing it seems similar to looking at the lifestyles of monastic orders within the Catholic church as indicative of the way Catholics live generally.

I was actually thinking of the same exact analogy- of having a monastic order and lay people with varying levels of commitment, but didn't put it in my reply because I couldn't think of a clear way to not overuse the analogy.

Nobody would say the Catholics are a group of lay religious people that also happen for some reason to overlap in membership with another unrelated group that enjoys monastic lifestyles. The monastic lifestyle is a central key part of the religion, even if it isn't what every Catholic chooses to do. It doesn't describe the entirety of the religion either. Both the core group that follow the full lifestyle together in person, and more distant or less involved participants are all together the same movement- with both the Catholics and Rationalists.

Importantly- when one criticizes the actions of Catholic monastics, it is considered relevant as criticism of the entire organization and religion, unlike the bowling example you gave. People do rightfully blame the Catholics for things like the Spanish Inquisition, and for protecting child abusers and rapists in their monastic communities, even if the average lay person had no involvement in these beyond supporting the religion financially and socially.

One could be a Mormon and fundamentally disapprove of bowling, even if a lot of other Mormons do it, but you probably aren't going to make it as a Catholic if you think monastic lifestyles are immoral or harmful. You probably won't make it as a rationalist either if you think things like utilitarian ethics, and nonmonogamy are immoral or harmful.

You've made a good argument here -- I'll have to consider it further.

I suppose I'm trying to separate the "rationalist" ideas, interpreted as a methodology of reasoning, from the normative positions that some communities advancing those methods have converged upon, even where the application of that reasoning methodology might have been involved in forming those other positions.

I do think that devotion to AI eschatology, nonmonogamy, and utilitarianism do not necessarily proceed merely from rational inquiry, and require additional normative or empirical precepts as inputs, many of which may have circulated in those communities in parallel to the discourse on reasoning. So that's sort of what the Mormon/bowling analogy was getting at.

"The rationalists" don't own rationality. I don't think the specific community of people I'm talking about that call themselves rationalists have a monopoly on actually teaching practical rational thinking, although they do have some very good materials that explain a lot of valuable ideas and concepts, which I am grateful for.

From their own philosophy, they claim that "rationality is systematized winning" and everyone I've known that decided to focus their life around any of the 3 things you mentioned above, had consequences that were close to the exact opposite of "systematized winning."

It's worth noting that basically every major founding member of the "Rationalist" community was, in fact, part of these other communities. While I don't normally consider criticism of Mormon theology relevant to bowling, it does seem relevant to critiquing the Mormon Bowling League of Utah.

I personally find all those norms refreshing, mind you. I'm just saying this is a place where they're really intractably interwoven. I'd assume if bowling was invented by Mormons, there'd be a lot of people thrown off when the word "Jesus" shows up in the section on evaluating strikes. Similarly, many people are thrown off when reading about statistics and it suddenly concludes God is dead and you should be polyamorous.

Mostly it’s way too full of itself. “Here’s how to think to be less wrong” (to borrow the name of one of the main sites) gives way to “since we know how to think, we’re smarter than everyone else.” Techniques like Bayesian inference get used to put a mathematical veneer on total guesswork or rationalize what the person wants to do anyway.

Take longtermism, for example. This is a segment of the rationalist community that focuses on doing the most good for humanity in the very long term. The basic idea goes: if humanity is able to get off this planet and go colonize the galaxy, there are untold quintillions of additional lives that would be lived. But that future is uncertain. Something that increases the chances of it happening by 0.1% would have an expected value of saving quadrillions of lives. If you can increase these chances by one in a trillion, that’s worth orders of magnitude more than saving a child’s life right now.

This is sound thinking so far. A fun little thought experiment. The problem is that you can’t rigorously apply it practically. Predicting the future of humanity is hard and probabilities assigned to various events aren’t rigorous. In practice, this mindset either leads to fairly obvious conclusions like that it’s important to fight climate change, or it’s off the wall stuff like being obsessed with AI safety. And the veneer of math produces an attitude that anyone who disagrees is not only wrong, but provably wrong in a mathematical fashion, which doesn’t tend to endear.

The rationalist idea of doing morality as math with utilitarian consequentialism always seemed dangerous and a big mistake to me. It is easy to rationalize things that are obviously awful or absurd from common sense, and not meaningfully consistent with normal human experience or human brains and motivations. SBF for example justified all of his crimes with rationalist logic.

I'm not going to walk past a drowning kid in a lake so I can urgently go to a nerd meeting planning to save a quintillion imaginary sci-fi distant future kids - even if some made up math says the expected value of the meeting is a thousand times higher.

Fundamentally, I do have deontological ethics- I think the ancient stoics basically had morality/ethics right, and admire people that take a Socrates like stand on doing what is right on principle even in the face of manipulative people trying to control you by creating bad consequences.

It’s not just dangerous, but plainly incorrect in most cases.

It’s the usual GIGO problem. These arguments almost always start with a bunch of completely made-up numbers. It doesn’t matter how good the math is, the results will be useless.

It can work. When a government regulator decides whether to mandate some new safety equipment and after rigorous technical analysis concludes that it would result in net lives lost and so doesn’t require it, that’s sensible. But thats not what happens here.

I occasionally see this problem acknowledged, but even then, the given error bars are way too small and then it’s just full steam ahead anyway.

It could be dangerous anyway, but this makes it even more so.

Yeah, I think it is literally provably 'optimal' if you can execute it correctly with informative data, don't forget or omit any important considerations, and aren't just making up BS- all of which are almost always impossible for regular humans in real life no matter how much 'rationality training' they've had. It makes sense both for optimal behavior of some hypothetical superintelligent AI to realize its own goals efficiently, or for something like a government to weigh pros and cons of a difficult regulatory choice with well defined short term consequences - neither of which are anything like the everyday morality decisions humans make.

I take an even more sour view of this thought process. I don't actually think that SBF did the math and concluded that rationality justified his crimes. I think that he wanted to do those crimes and then, consciously or unconsciously, spread the veneer of rationality over them as a form of self-justification.

I think that a community that engages in brute math with unbounded values for priors to justify action would be worrisome. By choosing the right priors you can conclude almost anything. But I actually think that it is just roughly the same decision making that the rest of the world makes, with an unusual post-facto justification that also feeds one's ego.

It seems like that to me as well- that the whole thing can be a manipulative way to make what you wanted to do anyways seem somehow objectively correct. Which is basically the postmodernist criticism of any attempt to use logic or science for anything- and in some cases is valid.

I imagine that the leader of the Singularity Institute (now Center for Applied Rationality) using the workshops as a recruitment ground for his personal psychedelic drug cult, and his followers then killing a bunch of innocent people, did not do any favors to their perception among the wider public [1].

(This is about the SF Bay Area subculture dubbed the rationalists, obviously not related to the philosophical moment of the same name, critiqued by Kant in the late 18th century)

[1] https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-zi...

This is incredible reading. It's hard to believe, but I believe it.

I don't think they actually are. I think that this is instead actually a convenient story that people in the community tell themselves and others because it makes people feel smart.

Going Infinite is a clear example of being fooled by this. SBF says he is actings on all of this bayesian probability stuff and Michael Lewis falls for it, concluding that SBF is actually thinking more clearly and rationally than the rest of us when actually SBF is just a flake and goes back on his commitments because he doesn't really care.

> I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished

tbf, they're also strongly incentivised to look surprised and disappointed when a faithful is banished.

And for that matter to latch on to someone else's wild suspicions even if they're daft, because if that person's theory turns out to be wrong (or even if it's right!), you're unlikely to be the person targeted for going along with it. Jury service doesn't come with the expectation that you're likely to be voted out by teammates or "murdered" if you come up with a decent counterargument or spot something tangible that nobody else does.

> It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences.

I served on a criminal trial jury (U.S.) for 3 weeks and when the trial was over, there was no restriction on who I could talk to or what I could say about the experience.

In California at least there is no law preventing the jury from talking to anyone about the case AFTER the jury returns its decision.

Ditto, lengthy trial with a hung jury. Judge instructed us that we were permitted but not required to talk after we left, although there might have been an admonition about personal information of other jurors.

I tried to give useful feedback to both of the lawyers, since I suspect neither of them were really happy with the mistrial outcome.

An important difference is that a jury acquittal is not saying you think the defendant is innocent, but rather that the evidence did not establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocence is assumed.

You could think somebody is probably guilty but also feel obligated to acquit them. For a famous example I somehow doubt all the OJ Simpson jurors thought he was innocent, but he was acquitted nonetheless.

You could even think somebody is definitely guilty beyond any doubt and still acquit them if you think it’s the right outcome.

Indeed, and I suspect as more people learn about jury nullification, the world will grow more just.

>Indeed, and I suspect as more people learn about jury nullification, the world will grow more just.

One would hope, but back in the day it was a powerful tool to do the opposite where juries disagreeing with the law would find minorities guilty when they obviously weren't.

At least there’s an appeals process which can potentially remedy that. It’s far from perfect, but a jury’s power to convict is not absolute.

Also the [general] requirement for a unanimous vote to convict makes this form of juror action quite uncommon. By contrast a single juror can cause a jury to be unable to convict.

Appeals are generally based on erroneous judge's decisions, mostly pre-trial, but sometimes things like evidence foundation and objections during trial.

Appellate courts very rarely touch jury decisions. I know someone who was found guilty at trial and a week later a jury member wrote a letter saying she was persuaded to change her "not guilty" verdict by two other jury members who hadn't declared their relationship to each other, were using their cellphones in the jury room and had looked up the criminal history of the defendant in the newspapers (which turned out to be completely wrong). Even with that letter the trial court said it didn't affect the verdict, but in this case the appeals court made the rare decision to overrule. Interestingly they mentioned a racial issue too: "where a juror makes a clear statement that indicates he or she relied on racial stereotypes or animus to convict a criminal defendant, the Sixth Amendment requires that the no-impeachment rule give way in order to permit the trial court to consider the evidence of the juror's statement and any resulting denial of the jury trial guarantee."

It's harder to swing things that way because conviction needs to be unanimous.

Unless very extreme circumstances apply and a judge orders a jury not to talk, people on juries are generally allowed to talk about what happened after the fact. However, there are often very strict rules on soliciting jury members to talk to you and courts give jury members quite a bit of anonymity protection so that they can exercise their right not to speak about high-profile cases.

Generally, Jurors who want to talk about it in public are few and far between because there is no upside and a lot of downside.

>because people obviously can't talk about their experiences

Sure they can, at least in the US.

> The worrying observation I make from Traitors is how easily a group of about a dozen people can become so sure of guilt on so little evidence, and time after time of being knowingly wrong.

I agree, some of the theories they come up with are insane and I feel like this (UK) season in particular is characterised by a lot of tribalism and anti-intellectualism.

Against that, we have to remember that the aim of the show is to be as entertaining as possible to as many people as possible. Interpersonal drama is more popular than explorations of game theory, so I suspect casting was based on who would be the most entertaining rather than the best at the game. I also think the editing plays a big role in presenting viewers with a particular narrative. They can probably quite easily cast people as being good or bad, smart or stupid.

Personally I have always thought the game was inherently quite stacked in the traitors' favour. Ultimately information is absolutely crucial to the game, and the traitors have a lot more of it (at the start of the game, they are arguably the only ones who have any at all).

Also remember the viewer sees both sides and has complete information, whereas all contestants have very little to go by and no clues are given.

It would be interesting if fans edited the episodes into a "contestant viewpoint only" version that removed the TV viewer's perspective and allowed viewers to play along without knowledge of the traitors.

People are tribal. It's pretty rare to find someone who acts rationally, enlightened and educated at all times. Of course all of us here do!

I agree with you, but in fact I have nurtured within myself a healthy skepticism that, so far, has protected me from scams, etc. I feel like skepticism is a powerful weapon against propaganda.

Ask yourself, "Does that person have something to gain by lying?" "Yes" should immediately raise a red flag and you can go from there.

>Of course all of us here do!

Phew. You had me worried there for a second.

I would even go as far as to say politics, and extends to society as a whole. Repeat a lie for long enough, others will begin to believe it as a truth, and if you can convince a person they will benefit personally, they are more than willing to forgo decency and morality in favor of personal benefits. Of course, in this case people are given an excuse for this behavior under the guise of a “game”.

The thing that stood out to me was how, particularly in the first season, when people had no idea what to grab onto they just grabbed onto the first vague suggestion they heard and, not only that, did so with very few dissenters.

I think this is the mechanism propaganda takes advantage of. Where there's a gap in people's understanding, they can very easily inject their version of events into people's heads and people will broadly accept it. The knowledge vacuum wants to be filled when pushed for a decision. In fact it doesn't even need to be this highly overt form that we saw in the 20th century dictatorships, even relatively weak forms can still grip hard and then people are reluctant to walk back from them after the fact.

Some would accuse faithfuls of potentially being traitors merely for voting differently to how the group had done previously, on tenuous information, even though they had no idea whether the person they voted for was a traitor or not! Here we see how, when intentionally directed, propaganda can sustain the creation of the scapegoats out of those who dissent.

It seems there's a psychological trait of people accepting and repeating others ideas while others will keep tickling for more information. In business settings I've seen very educated people start to repeat the behavior and ideas of other less competent people, which I assume was the pressure of having something to do or say to fill in blanks, and that starts the process.

So "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" episode from the original "The Twilight Zone".

Pretty much exactly that, yeah.

A guy from my town was on the Traitors and did attempt to take advantage of the loophole you mentioned and they almost entirely edited him out of the series.

My spouse and I are avid consumers of the series and we have been hypothesizing on and off why 1-2 game participants each season get almost no screen time whatsoever. Originally we thought it might simply be that the people in question make boring television. This is another possibility we had not even entertained - that the producers were punishing people for meta-gaming.

Based on my knowledge of the show and commentary around its filming, it does seem genuinely mostly unscripted - which means that producers are probably reaching for other mechanisms to control dialogue and contestant behavior and probably threatening screen time for breaking the 4th wall is an effective one.

Is this him? https://thetraitors.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_McNeill

It’s hard to know how much of the time they actually believe someone is guilty, vs just going along with the group, though. There’s a strong incentive to vote with the group because otherwise if someone is a traitor you look suspicious. And if the conversation is going after one person and that isn’t you, you’d like it to stay that way.

I don’t think it necessarily reflects how a jury etc works. If you acquit, you don’t have to choose someone else to accuse. You’re not going to face accusations yourself. You don’t have to repeat the process every day.

On your second point, I’m sure the UK second season changed the order to eliminate that, but it’s back this season. I’m sure a player mentioning it would be edited out though, so it’s hard to know if anyone assumes it’s still the case.

Yes. Another disincentive for finding a traitor in the first half of the game is that they just get replaced, and you get a target on your back. A good playing strategy is to be just vocal enough, with some open opinions.

I've only watched the Australian seasons of the Traitors, but they're so heavily weighted in favour of the traitors, I don't see how the faithful can win.

Yes, this is exactly why groups of people make me genuinely scared. You can't use logic to argue with them.

When I was a kid there were shows where people would work together on challenges and vote out the least helpful team member, and a friend of mine said once "as a kid I already noticed that in these shows it's not the best person that wins, but the most clever and cunning".

I don’t think it’s fair to carry this to the justice system. This is a forced scenario where they have to pick one AND invent the evidence - they’re the jury, judge, and executioner. The justice system waits until someone is suspected of something and then eventually they go through the system, where laws and procedures have been created to try and remove unfair processes. Juries are given explicit instructions about what can and cannot be considered, evidence can be thrown out on a technicality, etc.

Conviction rates are all over the place [1] depending on state, where in some places (like MA) you’re more likely to not be charged than charged. Of course the opposite exists too. Most people (97%) who are charged with federal crimes plead guilty, suggesting that most of them did in fact do it (yes some may not feel like they could win even if innocent, but that won’t be the majority). The innocence project estimates between 1-10% of people are wrongly incarcerated - this is a strong minority of the people and a hit rate that’s way better than traitors.

Unlike traitors, there are definitions for beyond a reasonable doubt, requiring hard evidence, etc.

I think traitors actually argues FOR our current justice system - look what happens when you remove all the rules and procedures, instead just allowing mob rule.

[1] https://www.paperprisons.org/statistics.html

There is always off screen stuff that pushes the participants toward acting a certain way. This holds true for nearly all reality TV shows

My cofounder Zak and I were on a show called "Planet of the Apps" by Apple, many years ago. I met Jessica Alba, Gwenyth Paltrow, Will-I-Am, and Gary Vaynerchuk.

I can tell you that a lot of these shows are staged. They tell you to "react like X" and then film you again and say "react like Y" and they slice and dice footage to show whatever they want. In the case of that show, they completely edited us out of the final show.

So it's not really easy for contestants to "sneak something past the censors" :)

> the last person to enter the breakfast room after a kill night is almost always a faithful

Never trust the order things happen in reality tv. They will show reaction shots to completely different things, mess up the order of shots, cut things completely out of order, etc, to drive a narrative.

Indeed. https://youtu.be/BBwepkVurCI

It is bizarre to me that so many posters in this thread are discussing a tv show as if it reflects reality. Perhaps it is submarine marketing?

A friend was in one of those reality Amazing Races program, where another couple's husband was quite vilified; she said actually he was ok, but somehow they managed to get every single time he blew up and stitched it together to make him seem really terrible.

Reality shows make or break in two spots: casting and editing.

Whatever is in the middle is nice and all, but those two make it interesting

This reminds me of a party game I played once called Mafia, which is a bit like Among Us but played verbally. I was a bit drunk, and the designated villain was very socially adroit, which I most certainly am not. The villain easily convinced the other players I was the villain, on the basis, I think, simply of his charisma and perceived trustworthiness.

I was struck by how readily the other players followed what seemed like blatantly manipulative suggestions in a game where you know the goal is deception.

This game (under the "Mafia" name) has been popular in Finnish math-contest circles since some time in the 1990s, probably as a Russian import. In large groups there can be many more roles, such as the axe-wielding lone killer, the police chief who gets reliable information from the game master, and the doctor who can rescue a victim if they guess correctly. Lots of fun.

Someone mentioned Blood on the Clocktower <https://bloodontheclocktower.com/> which has many more roles and a more complicated game that can take hours. The upside is that you aren't out of the game when you are eliminated.

In the other direction, there is a One Night Ultimate Werewolf ruleset <https://www.wargamer.com/one-night-ultimate-werewolf/review> that leads to a much faster game because it's not iterated.

I also learned about Mafia from participating in math competitions (in the US)! My teachers were Turkish immigrants and they introduced us to the game and we had a blast. it did suck for the person who died on night 1, though.

I see a lot of comments about werewolf. The best strategy I found as a civilian is to ignore all rhetoric and simply analyze voting behavior. That is, assuming no one is paying too close attention you analyze voting behavior.

I've seen some crazy stuff. I remember one person playing like a complete werewolf but my intuition said he was just a very ignorant civilian. It turns out that I was right. After asking him why he played how he played, he genuinely thought he was making the best moves. It taught me that some people can seem malevolent but ultimately mean really well.

It taught me that there are many matches where it's 100% known that someone is the seer, gives the winning piece of information, gets killed off by the werewolfs and the village somehow manages to completely not act (or worse forget) on what the seer said, allowing the werewolfs to win the game.

Werewolf has taught me a lot about group dynamics, which is also why I find certain political realities in multiple countries right now not that weird. I've seen weirder behavior with werewolf, albeit on a smaller scale in a fantasy setting with solely highly educated people.

Haven't seen The Traitors, but recently started watching a Korean Netflix show called The 8 Show and the plot involves some mystery organizer (similar to Squid Game, I suppose) creating a setup that is a microcosmic version of trickle-down economics. I'm currently taking a break from the show because the behavior of the most powerful player in the game was so on point with what we see in reality, it became blood-boiling!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_8_Show

Just wanted to thank you for the reccomendation, the premise looks extremely interesting.

While on the subject of Korean (game) shows, I found The Devil's Plan quite enjoyable.

The Devil's Plan is in my top5 reality shows easily

There was very little extra drama and everyone was super smart and tried to game the game into getting everyone as far as possible.

And the metagame with the secrets within secrets was chefskiss perfection

There is a social game that was popular here when I was a teen.

It was called "Werwolf" and I hated it so much that I stopped participating after one game IIRC (I was very fun at parties).

Reading up on it, it drew from the mentioned "Mafia" idea mentioned here.

Would have never known, interesting submission.

Still super popular and the whole basis for the game Among Us and many other computers games as well as board games.

Ah yes, that's the deal with Among us! This one passed me too, but I remember the description sounding somewhat similar.

Well, maybe should give the type of game another try. Tastes change and at the age at which my friends played "Werwolf", I was pretty much hating myself and everything around me so maybe I'd enjoy it today :)

The best versions of these games are set up to provide more contextual information than just "Player B Died Last Night". Classic Werewolf or Mafia, all information is public information, outside of people just talking to each other in whispers. Among Us adds a map and location information - you have to have been near the person who died to kill them, so if someone died in one room, you suspect players who were near that room or can't account for their location. Clocktower or One Night generally add information that only one player gets, such as being able to know if they're seated next to a bad player, which is powerful, but easy to lie about and risky to just admit since it makes you a target for the bad people.

We used to play this on IRC. Was quite fun.

I've played Mafia several times and enjoy it a lot. However, I have also witnessed friendships completely destroyed in the process. Some people are capable as seeing it as just a game, discard all prior trust or expectations with others during, and then at the end, reset completely back to how it was before, perhaps having learnt something about people in the process.

For those who cannot do this, they will experience true pain, broken trust, and leave with friendships fundamentally changed. If this sounds like you, do not play this game!

There's a similar pay game called "Blood on the Clocktower". You probably wouldn't like it, but those who like Werewolf or Mafia might want to give it a look.

I've tried it a few times, but it's so much more complex that it really requires everyone who's playing to care deeply about reasoning through it. There's so little information that's public to everyone, so if even one player with a role that lets them get private information doesn't understand or communicate that well, the whole game can fall apart.

I don't understand how this game gained so much popularity, because it's impossible to get any kind of reliable information in this game. For example, you have an ability that let's you ask the game master (in private) about whether one person is evil or not (their alliance). The game master is going to give you an answer, BUT it's possible that the answer is not the truth, because:

* you are drunk (which you don't know about)

* you were poisoned that night (which you don't know about)

* the target might be protected in some way (which you don't know about)

* some powers literally let the game master decide if they work or not (you will not be told it did not work)

Imagine the first few nights of mafia style games, where nobody knows anything, so everybody is just going on hunches and feelings. That's Blood on the clocktower for almost all the nights.

I love it, at least with the right group, because while you basically never get reliable information, you do get a large amount of it. Some will be contradictory, some will match, most will need to be expanded on. You piece together narratives matching the evidence, poke holes in these narratives, offer alternative explanations, determine probabilities that multiple people are both speaking the truth. It's not that nobody knows anything, instead everyone knows something and will need to decide when and what to share with others. You might be able to get someone killed with a random accusation, but you're just as likely to reveal yourself to be a liar to someone in the process.

Clocktower is not meant to be a solvable game. In fact, solvability is a big problem in One Night. The most boring games of Clocktower are those where you can coldly logic everything out because there is No Other Way for things to have happened.

Clocktower is the ultimate iteration of a social deception game. It’s about the lying. It’s about the storytelling; not just by the storyteller but by the players themselves who have to create the alternative narratives and convince their friends of those narratives.

Clocktower is so good because it forces people to work together, and assume unreliable narrators regardless of intent. It gives individuals unique and powerful abilities, giving a lot of agency on the game regardless of whether they are dead or not. And because of all of this, it’s not the few but the many that achieve a success for their team.

I am utterly fascinated by this game and, more than that, thanks to its format, it yields a huge framework for experimentation by scriptwriters and storytellers. I have stopped playing any other kind of social deduction game - none can even hold a candle to Blood on the Clocktower.

I used to run weekly Mafia/Werewolf parties: casual 2h nights with almost always 2-3 new folks.

For me running it (i.e. Being the "god", the narrrator etc.) is much more fun in such a context, as it's more about storytelling.

The main problem is that the game is quite unfun for the first 2-3 days: it's basically impossible to know who's who, so any sneeze, look or being the first one to speak will instantly make you a target of the crowd. There was a guy who just was a chatty guy and always started the conversation and he almost never made it past day 1. Absolutely unfair and unfun.

Whenever he wasn't killed on day 1 it was always due to someone standing up to the obvious unfairness and getting themselves killed, while he would get to live 1 extra night.

That's why we started adding extra unconventional roles and rules, to make up for this. For example, having a necromancer, who could turn a dead into a ghost who could do an action once. These changes would require to be more than 15 people, as you need to adjust the mafia in response.

The format is fun, the basic rules get boring pretty fast, given how newbies tend to play.

On the other hand, competitive mafia seems more about ninja communication and discussion, also I think they can also skip a voting.

One night ultimate werewolf fixes a lot of this. Many roles, easy narration, and no player termination (everyone plays every round).

+1 for One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Removing the need for a narrator role and keeping the game short enough that the antagonistic behaviors don't have a chance to develop works wonders. Friend and couple fights after Mafia are real. Werewolf is pretty kid-friendly too.

I’m that guy who’s always killed day one.

The worst part is there’s actually nothing you can do about it. Decide to clam up and stop making yourself a target? Super suspicious, he’s the werewolf this time for sure!

Exactly, absolutely nothing you can do.

On a brand new night, someone outright stated that "they pick guy X, since he is always the first one to go". I guess empathy is lost on that one.

Describing John Bercow as a "disgraced British parliamentarian" is underselling him. He is a disgraced speaker! That isn't a minor post. And quite a funny speaker. He bought a little bit too much personality into it but was an intelligent man and a very interesting study into managing a room and giving flavour to proceedings.

One thing that always sticks out to me watching The Traitors, and which this article finally clarified for me, is that many players treat it as an iterated game, and it's not.

It's so common to hear things like "I'll take one for the team", but that's only ever a good move to make in an iterated game, assuming you're not entirely altruistic. There are "sub games" within this and it can apply there certainly, but that's not the only context where you hear players saying things like this (or often, encouraging others to take one for the team).

I think it's that these concepts are memes, embedded in our language and behaviour, but that many people don't think through their application to the situation they're actually in. I see this a lot in life, people doing things or advocating for things that "come next in the sequence", without thinking about their context and whether it makes sense in the moment.

It is an iterated game, though. It's socially beneficial for you to be seen behaving altruistically on national television. I think in most cases this is more valuable than whatever prize the TV show offers.

In that way it is an iterated game, true, but I'd strongly disagree that it's worth much being seen to be altruistic, and certainly less than the prize of ~£10-20k.

Being altruistic might mean something for those who know you, but will be drowned out by how you actually interact with them. Being on the show in any capacity is most of the benefit, and being memorable within that, most likely by being ruthless and not altruistic, is going to achieve the biggest impact.

This 9 minute BBC youtube video of how a 'traitor' got through to the end is a good overview of the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaBWiepkNk

They should just call the game Bureaucracy. I used to tell new consultants in govt, "beware the stupid, their powers are hidden, and you can't imagine what they will do to surive."

while the article states the show is a finite game, it's a relatively open or infinite game in an institution, and with similar strategies. the underlying mechanism of the game (or quality) the players are optimizing for is actually perfidy. I'd argue the effect of the games even starts to yield a physiognomy after a while, and we percieve it as hidden culture codes, but these are just the effect of strategies over time.

this flow of games, incentives, strategies, survivors, and evolved attributes is what makes beauty a moral standard in nature. it's pretty fascinating stuff.

From my Werewolf experience, translated back into Faithful/Traitor:

Most Faithful explain their elaborate theories of what's going on and are quite often right. But it takes just one Traitor's "but what about X, who voted to banish a Faithful?" to completely derail the noobies. Even if the "Seer" calls out the bad guys and gets murdered/banished the next night.

Meanwhile, half the players are just socializing, drinking and not paying much attention at all. They're wild cards and seem to vote randomly.

The game is a pleasurable experience, but I wouldn't go too deep into theory, you'll be frustrated how people actually play the game.

We’ve been struck by how there really isn’t a strategy that works for the Faithful. As other people have pointed out, there’s a fairly scary tribalism to the voting, but very very little logic. And I’m not sure anything would actually “work” as a strategy unless you had skills reading body language or in NLP.

It's not clear to me the behaviour isn't fairly rational. It only seems irrational because the host tells the audience that the faithful are supposed to be finding traitors -- but they arent. Not at all. They're each aiming to win. Eliminating faithful is a necessary and prudent step.

Indeed, traitors have almost all of the power -- the ideal strategy as a faithful is to eliminate talented faithful and ally or sus-out for oneself who the traitors are.

In this light, any faithful expressing actual out-loud competence is a target for everyone, esp. other faithful.

It seem to me a good strategy is to play dumb, pretend to be confused that a competitor-faithful is a traitor, and target them.

yup. traitors tend to keep dumb-presenting faithful around because they give the impression of both not being a traitor as well as being unsavvy and easy to manipulate

What is the economics lesson though ? I figured they were talking about bounded rationality which the article touches upon in the last paragraph. But it would've been nice to get some confirmation within the article itself.

Keynesian beauty contests maybe

I must say, it's strange watching Traitors after watching Beast Games. It feels slow and lazy.

Traitors is one idea padded out with endless cringey "ceremony". (Claudia Winkleman walks down a corridor in a cape! Claudia Winkelman whispers "murder"! People gather and read out names slowly.)

In the Mr Beast version, the entire series would be boiled down to one 8 minute segment – and there would be 15 other original ideas besides it.

That's why God made 1.5x speed.

British TV shows have long targeted a extremely aged demographic. Most TV seems to operate as if you're a little senile and aren't really following what's going on, or would be too uncertain and scared by quicker edits and more emotional intensity.

That said -- there's little 1.5x doesnt paper over about bad pacing choices.

As well as 1.5x, jumping a couple of minutes after a screen goes dark often jumps the 'now you would've watched some adverts on real TV, here's a recapitulation of what you may have missed in the first part (you forgetful bastard)'

There's no ad breaks on the BBC.

I have a hard time watching anything for too long at 1.5-2x speed. After a while it feels like my internal monologue is running at the same speed and it's incrediblely distracting.

Hmm, mine already is ...

The Traitors is for my grandma. Beast games is for teenagers who are used to TikTok.

My thoughts: just because you can ingest everything at super speed it doesn’t mean you should!

Some things are richer for slowly taking them in and syncing up with the vibe and the experience.

Learning to truly focus on something seems to be a vanishing life skill!

Played the game (Mafia offshoot with some more complications) with my Swiss friends. The first round was very cringe, and everyone was fully predictable. Then, when people got the taste of it, I’ve seen their eyes glow, as they suddenly understood. Then we had alliances, counter-alliances, regular people adopting the mafia behavior so they won’t be accused this round, layers of trickstery, and all that. Fun times!

I watch this show, but one of the most annoying things about it is that the traitors are incentivised to murder the smartest, most intuitive players first, leaving people they can manipulate easily. Maybe you could argue the smartest move is to play dumb.

This is at its worst in the second Australian season, which is an incredibly frustrating watch.

That was one of the most frustrating seasons of any television show I’ve ever watched, right up until the finale—which completely redeemed it for me! What an ending.

> Maybe you could argue the smartest move is to play dumb.

Does playing smart advertise you as smart on a popular TV show, while minimizing the tedious reality-TV drama that you have to go through? The expected winnings aren't all that much. And most (desirable) employers are would rate "smart" as a more desirable trait than to "gullible" or "underhanded".

Similar strategy to Survivor: band together with less capable contestants to target the most capable person at the start.

> Some see a university education as an example of this: it costs cleverer and more conscientious types less to get a degree than stupider and lazier ones, allowing employers to distinguish between the two.

Wait, how? If two people both have a degree, how does that help distinguish who is stupid?

on average the "cleverer" ones get the degrees easier, hence there's a higher chance to pick a "cleverer" candidate if selecting by this criterion than when selecting at random

I think they mean it probabilistically: given the cost, a "stupid and lazy" person is less likely to get a degree, so employers can hope that the percentage of such people among university grads will be lower than in the general population.

Start with “the market for lemons” by George akerlof.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

The case you are confused by is a version of the model there. The relevant material is covered in any intermediate-to-advanced microeconomics textbook.

Is there a term for the "I know that you know that I know…" thing? It's a fundamental part of fighting game strategy, particularly the aspect called "yomi", i.e. reading the opponent's intentions so as to preemptively counter them.

This could go on indefinitely ("I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that..."). I always consider this related to the Byzantine Generals problem.

Yes and somewhat infamously in the fighting game context, high level players can sometimes psych themselves out completely in the heat of the moment, trying to recursively parse the infinite stack of reads and just completely bluescreening and getting hit by the most obvious option possible.

The term for an infinitely deep chain of that is "common knowledge"

There is a formalization using Modal Logic :) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/#Games

Rick vs. Heistotron (starts with an annoying pre-roll, hence the start-at-9-seconds parameter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyOAxh4Iybg&t=9

Theory of mind

In poker it's called levels. Fighter pilots call it being inside the other persons OODA loop.

In forum mafia this is called "Wine in front of me", or WIFOM[0], referencing the Princess Bride scene[1]

[0] https://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=WIFOM [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_eZmEiyTo0

the infinite regress

I didn't understand what the article meant by "The perfect Bayesian equilibrium, according to those who have studied Mafia, is voting randomly according to a pre-set public rule."

seems like among us without tasks

There are tasks in Traitors! They're done in a group with some things that traitors have different incentives for. But yes it makes it more like Among Us than werewolf!

Its a reality TV based Werewolf game

> … offers a useful economics lesson …

> With talk cheap, the only way to find a traitor is to study who is murdered and banished. One way of solving such a game is known as the “perfect Bayesian equilibrium”.

Great, more propaganda to push pseudoscientific neoclassical economics and neoliberalism policies.

What a load of horse shit. It’s a game. Nothing more. Nothing less. No economic lesson here.

Economist is nothing more than a neoclassical, “trickle down economics” propaganda machine.

I agree. In a short, finite game with limited number of observations -- observation and logic is of little help. Rationally, when presented with unfair/unwinnable rules, the logical thing is to "cheat" or break the rules.

I am interested in what ways players have tried to cheat the game. For example, if I am a faithful, I would mandate that will be no private conversations to minimize the ability of the traitors to communicate and plan. I would enforce a rule that everyone must stay within eyesight of everyone else as much as possible. When people sneak out to have conversations, I would use that as data on who the possible terrorists are.

Sounds like “Among Us”

I tried watching the British version and couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes in. Cringy and dumb, it seemed to me.

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