Open 804: Popcorn Mafia Redux [Game Over!]

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I missed the Imperium part of STT's questions for me. Here's that answer.

STT, if you approach this game the way you do, you should always be willing to entertain counterfactuals. This means looking in depth at someone's posting to really beat the hell out of your reads on them and consider the case where you are wrong. And there should /always/ be meat for scum and town both for any given slot, because scum tries to look like town and town shouldn't really care too much about looking scummy. If you can't put meat on one side or the other, that means either you're working with a newbie, working with someone like me whose approach to the game is totally alien, or something is wrong with how you're looking at the game. Imperium doesn't seem like that odd a player, and certainly isn't a newbie. That leaves just one possibility.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

By the way, if anyone wonders why scum even try to push obvtown slots, the above is why. /Everyone/ looks scummy if you want them to, no exceptions. Same thing with town defending obvscum slots; there is almost no play that is so scummy that you can't rationalize a solid reason to do it as town.

[Imperium]

I'll be back later. I can finally leave my house, so I'm doing so! Yay me outside world here I come.

But real quick - Peta I saw that you said that you were pissed at the BoP argument and I just wanted to clear one thing up. It was a bit personal in how you were reading me, and some of that applied to your mush stuff too. But I never meant to imply that you had to read me correctly or that you were such a good player that you'd never read me or anyone wrong. I don't expect anyone to read me correctly all the time; I think Faraday is the only person that I had that expectation of, but he just read me really really well but doesn't play anymore. I do sometimes expect that people who know my scum range really to see when I'm out of it somewhat, but even then I don't expect a perfect read every time. Might say "you wouldn't be scum reading me for x reason," etc.

My focus is on the type of analysis, so the analysis and reading of the read didn't mesh up with what I believe I know or how I have seen you read and analyze people in games. The reasoning felt wrong and agenda driven.

Maybe you understood and there was no clarification necessary, but in case you thought I was implying you wouldn't be wrong, that wasn't what I meant.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Sorry for posting a /fourth/ time in a row, but I wanted to also add (and didn't think of until I hit Submit for the last one) that this is why I don't care for arguments that say a slot must be some alignment, and am much more interested in arguments about why that slot CANNOT be a different one.

PEDIT: thank god for Imperium breaking my post streak, now I don't feel like a monster.

[petapan]

Peta is kind of poe scummy for other reasons though, and since a lot of other people see them as scum and I don't really have my own opinion I have them as scummy

how do you not have an opinion on me

[petapan]

petapan, I demand your Day 2 reads-chart! When you get around to it. (If you won't for awhile, I demand some acknowledgement that you have read my post. Also, my demands are not currently backed by mortar fire, so if you are boring and hate suspense you can substitute "request".)

yeah i'll get to it in a bit

[petapan]

some of this i was assembling yesteday, if you feel like i got anything wrong point me to the posts


trying to look over duchess's ISO and it looks like they knew they were screwed yesterday, they barely said anything about anyone, but I'll try to scrape it for clues

[petapan]

Norfolk's posting just seemed excessively LAMIST to me

Really? I think saying that you don't want the gun is scummy as opposed to towny, on the surface.

Whemstar who is asking to be shot is LAMIST in my mind.

To me Norfolk looks like he is overcompensating for something he did that he knows looks scummy on the surface, so I agree with both of you if that makes any sense. I also agree that Whemestar's eager attitude looks like an act to me.

Guys I was memeing about shooting Norfolk chill...

What do you think of Norfolk now? Has your read on him changed since you said it?

I'm not digging ScrewTheTells jumping in and claiming it's suspicious that i'm not posting when it's Sunday night in the UK.

Anyone suggesting a committee or that votes should decide the shot is a scum candidate for me.

The only confirmed town is Netflix, so Netflix should decide.

Who do you see making that suggestion? Who do you think is scum?

Norfolk Boy has made 4 posts and Whemestar has 46, so your last point about diverting attention definitely does not apply to me. If there is anything diverting attention away from Norfolk, it is Norfolk's own lurking.

I'm not digging ScrewTheTells jumping in and claiming it's suspicious that i'm not posting when it's Sunday night in the UK.

Anyone suggesting a committee or that votes should decide the shot is a scum candidate for me.

The only confirmed town is Netflix, so Netflix should decide.

Another bad Norfolk post
They're basically saying don't scumhunt, it's netflix's job.

This is a rather liberal interpretation, in my opinion.

Norfolk's posting just seemed excessively LAMIST to me

Really? I think saying that you don't want the gun is scummy as opposed to towny, on the surface.

Whemstar who is asking to be shot is LAMIST in my mind.

To me Norfolk looks like he is overcompensating for something he did that he knows looks scummy on the surface, so I agree with both of you if that makes any sense. I also agree that Whemestar's eager attitude looks like an act to me.

Where did he overcompensate and what was scummy on the surface?

Norfolk's first post reads to me almost the same as when scum feigns confusion about a Night Kill upon day start. He is overcompensating in his next post in that he ignores the implication that Whemestar is casting suspicion his way, and instead casually replies as if he is known town. He made his first post, 3 people immediately condemned it, he realized how scummy it was, and then tried to throw in a fake townslip to compensate.

MUSHSHAGANA

unwnd
Dunnstral
ScrewTheTells

Imperium

Not_Mafia
Rockhopper

Norfolk Boy1
SirCakez
WhemeStar
RLotus

these are the only places duchess talks about norfolk in their iso, even tries to defend him him to cakez before making some weird statement about his first posts

[ScrewTheTells]

Re petapan:

[...]

My scum read of Imperium hasn't changed much, but now they've also tied their fate with petapan's. If Petapan flips town I'm certain imperium is scum. If Imperium flips scum I think petapan is confirmed town. After failing on their wagon on Cakez and this slot, Imperium probably sees a last opportunity to win with misfire before town kills one of their scumbuddies and makes things a lot harder. The turn on to petapan is too hyped right now. They made all this noise about a smoking gun but it's funny that they delayed the big premiere. Maybe this is a psychological trick to get us more hyped than we should be. Priming us for the argument. I dunno, I can't wait to see the actual substance. Right now it's just "trust me, petapan is scum because meta". I trust meta but I don't trust Imperium, that's the problem.

lmao that quote is clearly trying to set up a dichotomy where one of us has to be scum, it's complete bullshit, don't try to deny it, you've been trying to chain shots on imperium and whoever is pushng them for most of the game

See, when you say "dichotomy" I think you're implying I said that "For reason X, one of these 2 must be scum". And that's not what I mean here.

If by dichotomy you mean "one player's flip is evidence towards another's alignment" then yes that's what I was saying. How is what I'm actually saying wrong though? You think I shouldn't be taking flip information into account??? I don't get it.

Also how is it chaining? I've already been saying Imperium is scum at that point. My preference was to shoot Imperium before you. If that happens then according to my logic there, I wouldn't shoot you. Where's the chained shot? I guess it could be seen as a chained shot if you got shot before Imperium. But I wasn't advocating for you to get shot, so if you get shot that's not me trying to chain mis-fires, that's a misfire caused by whoever actually pushed you i.e. Imperium. I don't see how this is evidence of me chaining shots

On another note, maybe I'm reading your chart wrong, but I think you didn't put any of my reads there. I'm sure I posted my reads on Day 2. You can take the bottom 5 on this list as "scum" on your chart, that's how I was thinking of it at the time.

Town to scum:

petapan
SirCakez
Dunnstral
unwnd
WhemeStar
Duchess
Imperium
MUSHSHAGANA
Norfolk Boy1
Not_Mafia

---
Re MUSH:

STT, I find it /hilarious/ that you are trying to figure out the one part of my current play that I have explained in detail to everyone. That in fact were some of my first posts for this dayphase. That's adorable.

ISO me.

By that you mean that WIFOM made you second guess your top suspect? That's what I mean by "maybe I don't respect WIFOM enough here". I would generally disagree.

I missed the Imperium part of STT's questions for me. Here's that answer.

STT, if you approach this game the way you do, you should always be willing to entertain counterfactuals. This means looking in depth at someone's posting to really beat the hell out of your reads on them and consider the case where you are wrong. And there should /always/ be meat for scum and town both for any given slot, because scum tries to look like town and town shouldn't really care too much about looking scummy. If you can't put meat on one side or the other, that means either you're working with a newbie, working with someone like me whose approach to the game is totally alien, or something is wrong with how you're looking at the game. Imperium doesn't seem like that odd a player, and certainly isn't a newbie. That leaves just one possibility.

I don't think we're on the same page here. Your model of how you think I operate sounds accurate in some parts but not others. This isn't really an issue of counterfactuals, it's an issue of certainty. I'm not thinking in terms of "well, they are scum, but what if they are town?". I'm actually thinking like "they are either scum or town, but I don't know which, so what do I see that points towards one or the other?" When you say there should always be some meat for both town and scum, you completely lost me, because why would there be? My best attempt to parse this phrase is that you are telling me that because WIFOM exists, any observed action could point towards both scum and town. Which is true, that's the definition of WIFOM. And it's also why I try to ignore WIFOM-heavy evidence and look for stuff that are less prone to WIFOM.

By the way, if anyone wonders why scum even try to push obvtown slots, the above is why. /Everyone/ looks scummy if you want them to, no exceptions. Same thing with town defending obvscum slots; there is almost no play that is so scummy that you can't rationalize a solid reason to do it as town.

And this is exactly why I try not to over-think stuff, and stay away from WIFOM. Okay if you're asking me to rationalize (i.e. sprout ad-hoc bullshit) about why Imperium is looking town, then yes of course I am capable of doing that. I just didn't think that's what you wanted since that's completely irrelevant to how I read people lol. I'm trying to cut down on the rationalization, not trick myself into tunneling more on people. To be clear, the town-Imperium stuff I mentioned are not rationalizations. They are things that I think do point towards Imperium being town. It's just that when I add it up with the other stuff that point in the opposite direction I end up with a net-read of not-so-town.

Anyways this is kind of a huge tangent that's all very theoretical.

[SirCakez]

You're not gonna get anywhere arguing with Mush

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Oh no. If I had wanted rationalizations, I'd have asked Cakez or Dunn. (No offense meant to either of them.)

WIFOM isn't it either. Look at it like this: scum are trying to look like town. Town aren't particularly concerned with appearances. As a result, scum will intentionally do things that town would do. By contrast, town will unintentionally do things that scum would do. The fact that you misread me proves one part of this absolutely: you are capable of seeing scum in town.

What I'm curious about is if you are capable of finding the flip side, the town parts in the people you scumread. Flat out: those parts /have/ to exist, or it's gamethrowing. The scum /have/ to blend in with the town, especially in this setup where all it takes is getting the wrong attention of the wrong fool at the wrong time.

But who gives a shit about all of that. I was digging through your ISO, looking for filth, as you do. And I started to notice something real funny. Like, hilarious.

So here's how you started this day off. I'm bolding the important bits here.

Okay so I was very wrong about MUSH being scummy. Sorry MUSH. :/ At least Duchess flipped scum, otherwise I'd think I'm probably hopeless this game.

--snip--

In general I have to re-calibrate the weight of my previous reasons for suspecting Imperium now that I know I was wrong about MUSH.

The most convincing reason to see Imperium as town is that their reactions, their emotions, seem genuine. They put a lot of effort into asking people questions to find out whatever info they need. They are not shy about putting themselves in the spotlight. When I called them scum it didn't deter them from their initiative, so it's either good town or scum trying to redirect. They're super hyped about their case on petapan in a way that seems town-like. I mean if I had a good reason to think someone is scum, as they say they do, I believe I'd act the same way (although, unwnd noted that they believe Imperium was capable of faking this conviction so....but then again how much should I weigh unwnd's words? I don't have a good reason to).

--snip--

Now see, what's really, really funny is that /that/ is supposedly coming from the same person as ALL OF THIS:

--snip--

So I think MUSH's scum meta would be highly valuable information in this situation. Like I said before, I place a lot of weight on scumhunting effort, and MUSH's consistent writing of walls is making me feel that she's town. But I can't actually find myself agreeing with the substance of most of those walls, and that's why I also had a contrasting feeling that she's scum. E.g. the psychoanalysis of Cakez.

I think MUSH is reasoning is overly specific, and relies way too heavily on arbitrary extrapolations, which seems like scum coming up with ad-hoc rationalizations, and wrapping them up in many words to fit MUSH's wall-posting meta. I just can't see how you can actually scum hunt by over-analyzing extrapolated scenarios that are mostly just biased opinions dressed up and presented as ironclad logic.

I think unwnd and Cakez also pointed out this as basically "over-thinking".

MUSH's defense is that she always overthinks, which is fine for a personal playstyle, and no I'm not expecting this to change, that's not the point. The point is that this doesn't convince me that she's not scum. Because scum would do the same thing and take advantage of this meta to push however they want. When someone points out that they're just over-rationalizing a dubious point, they'd just say "but it's totally in line with my meta!"

I might be paranoid but when MUSH's first post in the game is a pre-emptive "my playstyle might be off because of my special IRL circumstances", that rings alarms in my head. I'm not trying to make light of your IRL stuff, I'm not here to talk about that. I just think if you were scum, your brain would be more likely to recognize excuses you can use to defend any inconsistencies from meta.

Sure, town-MUSH might well also say this, but I think there's a relatively larger chance that town-MUSH wouldn't think that the IRL circumstances would impact her wall-making enough, to the point where it has to be pre-emptively mentioned. Like, scum-MUSH would almost certainly see that this is a thing they should say because they know faking zealous walls as scum is hard. Scum-MUSH probably want to cover any inconsistencies because any deviations from her meta would be noticeable. Whereas town-MUSH might say it, or they might miss that train of thought and not say it. Therefore it is bayesian evidence to me, basically, slightly shifting MUSH towards scum in probability.

And then all the bad arguments in the walls just made this more likely.

--snip--

So MUSH and Imperium both jumped off of their wagon on me with coordinated swiftness and grace. I think you should try for the 2021 Olympic scum team for synchronized gymnastics.

--snip--

--snip--

I literally post probabilities between 0 and 1 for p(scum) that add up to the number of scum in game. There, I also posted probabilities assuming a flip goes one way or another, exactly as I have talked about Norfolk here. My whole raison-d'etre in mafia is to apply probability calculations to see how well it works in this game. Conditional probabilities are a huge part of that. It would be dumb if I didn't massively update my estimates on Cakez after I've been proven wrong about Norfolk (since that list is made with the current idea that Norfolk leans scum). At that point the only reads I have on either Cakez or Imperium was their takes on the Norfolk saga. It wasn't strong evidence in absolute terms, so it should obviously be easily swayed by future evidence that weighs more heavily. In other words Cakez's position at the top of that list doesn't have much of a lead from others at the top of the list, and it's almost all based on his interaction with Norfolk-Imperium. If one of those two flip then of course his standing will change dramatically.

I really didn't think I needed to explain this; I assumed Imperium was trolling the point as scum.

Also why are you calling these mislynches? You claimed to think Cakez was scum intentionally misrepping you. You were not against a Norfolk lynch. From that POV, the only possible mislynch from me drawing this association might be you, if you're town. This doesn't make any sense. Sounds to me like you looked at a way to find my words scummy, then rationalized your way to "they're setting up mislynches by stating these associations".

Lotus, tell me you're not convinced by this bullshit argument. If you are I can write more walls but I thought this is enough. Imperium's rationalizing, I'm not trying to talk to Imperium here.

--snip--

And more besides.

Like, listen man, I had you pegged as the arrogant asshole of the playerlist. I knew exactly what to expect out of each post you put in the thread: big words and condescension. I really bought into that whole thing, got to looking forward to your next snarky post. Hell, it's why I asked you to towncase Imperium. And you know what you gave me? You gave me garbage. And not even snark to go with it.

I mean look at that -- "not shy" and "super hyped" and "seem genuine". That language.

Compare that to what we have before: "reasoning is overly specific", "relatively larger chance", "almost certainly". "Massively update". "Strong evidence in absolute terms". "Based on his interaction". I could go on.

And the snark! Where'd it go? "Sorry MUSH." You even used a /smiley/. And it hasn't reappeared since then, either. No "obviously would" or "it would be dumb" even. Instead we get "maybe I'm reading your chart wrong", and "I don't see" and "I don't get it". All that attitude just drained right out of you.

Damned shame.

[WhemeStar]

Im happy with norfolk shot shoot him mush

[WhemeStar]

Does Imperium still want norfolk shot?

[WhemeStar]

Err peta

[Dunnstral]

some of this i was assembling yesteday, if you feel like i got anything wrong point me to the posts


trying to look over duchess's ISO and it looks like they knew they were screwed yesterday, they barely said anything about anyone, but I'll try to scrape it for clues

Implying I have no reads at all is just... wrong and feels bad faith

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Wheme, you aren't reading my posts, so there's not much point in telling you that I'm not taking directions for the shot, I'm trying to get people to scumhunt. However, I am a notorious fool, so here I am, typing into the void.

If by some odd chance your ignore-MUSHSHAGANA filter falls down, how about you find scum instead of trying to back-seat-fire-control?

[petapan]

some of this i was assembling yesteday, if you feel like i got anything wrong point me to the posts


trying to look over duchess's ISO and it looks like they knew they were screwed yesterday, they barely said anything about anyone, but I'll try to scrape it for clues

Implying I have no reads at all is just... wrong and feels bad faith

i think i forgot to fill you in lmao

[petapan]

there u go dunn i hope you're happy

[petapan]

tbh i think STT's day 2 readlist speaks for itself thank u 4 saving me the trouble

[MUSHSHAGANA]

tbh i think STT's day 2 readlist speaks for itself thank u 4 saving me the trouble

Not that there's much of a point, but let's see here...

look there's a reason i went on this tangent to begin with. it's because i was composing this while i was catching up:



--snip--

Are we doing carryover of reads from Day 1? Cause then there's some missing ones. Or only if it's repeated? Or new reads only?

[WhemeStar]

i dont get how to read petas chart

[SirCakez]

I wish I had the gun and could just blindshoot five people the game would probably be over LOL

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I was tasked with an absurd workload directly related to my current situation, so I'm going to be sparse today.

Sure would like to hear more from unwnd and Imperium.

[Syryana]

Not_Mafia has been prodded. Norfolk Boy1 has requested replacement.

[unwnd]

My thoughts are pretty much the same. I've been putting off looking into Duchess because I am mostly locked into my confbias. What I said earlier about Wheme/Duchess trying to distance each other still applies, and the surrounding context behind it is the tepid relationship between the two. I know for a fact if I'm scum and someone is shouting for my death that I am going to do something about it, but instead Duchess just offers biting criticism for Wheme ignoring them and at best a wag of a finger.