Mafiascum.net

I'm in the middle of writing another reply to you, Moment, but want to say that's just silly. There are two or three comments in this thread saying "STOP SPEWING YOURSELF NOT-TD" and that's what I'm responding to, so if you're looking for people keeping track of that there is no reason to start with me.

I think there's a difference between directly responding to someone making actions to indicate that they are not the TD and "keeping track of who is not the TD", but I will concede that my point is a fairly weak one.

In post 1151, Moment wrote:I think there's a difference between directly responding to someone making actions to indicate that they are not the TD and "keeping track of who is not the TD", but I will concede that my point is a fairly weak one.

Pretty sure Moment is town. I don't see scum admitting a point is weaker in this manner while engaging the substance and avoiding discussing if they are the TD or not.

In post 1102, Moment wrote:It's such wishful thinking to me to think that NK15 is scum. Either wishful thinking or pure laziness.

People just see "Oh, looks like he got caught fakeclaiming" and their brains stop thinking past that point. There can't be any more nuance, anyone who did that must be scum. Yes SS, I've already heard and responded to you talking about the scum motivation, you don't need to say it again. I feel as though you're making a failure of theory of mind – I don't think you're properly trying to think from NK15's perspective. I think his posts from the rest of this day strongly evidence the fact that he has pretty strong convictions in the setup that you're not considering when you think about motivation.

To anyone who says anything along the line of "well he'll always be a question mark so we have to deal with him", your mindset is truly flawed. There is nothing forcing your hand. Any sort of "obligation" you feel is completely constructed. Obviously you feel as though he's scum for what he's done, but my main point here is that that's just an

element

of a

read

, not any sort of obligation that something "must" happen. I say this because I think thinking along the lines of how someone "has to die anyways" is poison to thought. I have experienced it before where someone

agreed with me

on reasons to townread someone they thought had to die before endgame, and yet

still

they said "It doesn't matter anyways if I townread her, because she can't live to lylo".

There, just as it is here, I feel that once people had constructed in their head that someone could not live to the endgame, the relevance of reads on that player was out. Death eventually had to come, and specific arguments didn't really matter because of course she has to die anyways. I don't feel as though that mindset is germane to having a discussion or to winning the game.

This upsets me even further because NK15 is already among the least eloquent, least charismatic, most mislynched players on the entire site. If you're wondering why I keep making comments about making the same mistakes over and over, it's because I see the same players get lynched over and over by the same other players. Adding the situation with the PA on top of that is just too much. I was in the same situation as NK15 once upon a time, and I got out of it only through a grueling few days of

constant

argumentation

and

pushing a wagon on scum over myself. Of course NK15 was never going to get out of it. It just feels so unjust.


I wonder if some people even believe in the scumread themselves – truly believe, rather than just belief in belief. You're calling him a "douche" and getting really angry at him. What's the point of that if it was just a scum ploy to do whatever?

In post 1082, Iconeum wrote:the one thing i was unsure about was how to handle these douches who thought it was smart to fake claim PA and try to fake-lead on town

This is an excellent post, and deserves a response.

I don't think that everyone who ever lies is scum. I do think that lying is almost always (outside of a few highly specialized scenarios which are usually too obvious to argue) and it seems like you agree on that, since you aren't defending NK15's actions as good, so we have a starting point there. And I agree that if I'm convinced despite the lies that someone is town I'm not going to vote to execute them just because we "have to." That said I am a strong proponent of launching all liars (into the sun) in the absence of overwhelming evidence that they are nonetheless innocent. I don't see any such overwhelming evidence in this case.

I think an important aspect of my read on NK15's claim, which is subjective and impossible for me to prove so you can just believe me or not, is that at the time I saw it I the PA could confirm themselves. I sort of skimmed the rules for this game and missed a lot of the details like that, and so I only realized the role was confirmable when reading other responses to it. As such, I know it is possible to miss this and I think it's quite likely a smuggler!NK15 either didn't know or just wasn't thinking about that detail, and simply didn't realize the implications of fakeclaiming when he did.

Another aspect is the manner in which he carried out the claim: he didn't just say "I'm the PA, everyone else stop fakeclaiming" or something like that, he and specifically tried to set up a situation in which Others have made it clear how a plan like this impedes natural read formation and the only benefit is that it protects us from accidentally executing the TD, but if a non-PA is carrying it out But if NK15 is a smuggler then it makes perfect sense as, if carried out, it would have pretty much guaranteed a green flip today and allowed him to direct an investigation onto town that might reveal the TD. I don't know if it's a good plan (he did get counterclaimed after all) but it's at least a plan I can imagine someone thinking is good for long enough to pull the trigger on it.

So this isn't a case where I'm saying "sure it makes more sense for this claim to come from town but I'm going to vote them anyway." I actually think on balance NK15 is the most likely scum out of anyone in the game and that's why I'm voting him. If you don't think that then I guess you shouldn't, but I believe you're trying too hard to come up with innocent explanations for something that doesn't really have one.

As I ate breakfast this morning I was ruminating a bit on game theory and mafia, so allow me to go into a bit of a tangent.

A lot of times when people are lynched and flip town, people will still say that it was the "correct decision" to lynch them, or something along similar lines. I expect that that would be said if NK15 were to be town, and to be fair I have already said that I would say something similar if he were to flip scum – that I think my reasoning was still strong. What do people mean by this? How can something be the "correct decision" if it was incorrect? Are they just unable to accept that they were wrong?

Perhaps, but there at least something deeper there, and it relates to being "probability-oriented" rather than "results-oriented", if you've heard those terms before. I'll illustrate by way of example. Let's say that you're playing a game with a coin weighted so that heads comes up 2/3rds of the time, and tails 1/3rd. If you correctly call the flip, you gain a dollar, and if you're incorrect, you lose one. The correct decision is obviously to always call heads, no? A less obvious example: you're drawing and replacing red and blue cards from a deck where 60% of cards are blue and 40% are red, and similarly to before you have to guess whether you'll draw a red or blue card. Many people will say that the correct strategy is to guess blue 60% of the time and red 40% of the time, but the correct strategy is to always guess blue.

What's my point with all of this? These games have an obvious "correct strategy" – one that maximizes your winrate. Despite that, the coin might still come up tails, and you might still pull a red card. If that happens, does that mean that you made an incorrect decision? Similarly, if you were to guess tails instead and the coin came up tails, did you make the correct decision? This is the core division between being probability oriented and results oriented. A results oriented way of thinking would say that tails was correct if the coin actually came up tails, but being probability oriented tells you that there's no reason to guess anything other than heads. People who say that actions were the correct decision even when they were wrong are being probability oriented, and in some sense they're right to be. Generally being probability oriented is a lot better than being results oriented.

Maybe everyone already knows all of this, and I don't mean to condescend. But I'd like to bring my point back around to mafia now – as I've said, people often say that lynches were correct even when people have flipped town, and in some situations they may be right. But mafia is a lot more complex of a game than those simplified examples I gave – in those, it's obvious what the best strategy is, and so one can be quite confident in saying that even if tails were to come up five times in a row, heads was still the correct decision to make. I don't think the same is true of mafia.

Here we come to basically my thesis of this entire post: I think that, in mafia games, people convince themselves that they're being probability oriented a lot more than they actually are. There's an unbelievable amount of information available in any given game of mafia with which to read people and thus with which to make decisions, and thus to say that something is "the correct decision" is much less clear cut than with a game of weighted coins. Something may be the correct decision under the rule of "generally believe cop claims", but that's not the same thing as "correct decision". Of course, it's no easy task at all to recognize when to go against common rules such as that – in fact, I would say that it's a trait of only the best of the best of town players to be able to recognize when to go against common wisdom, and I don't claim to hold any such consistent ability myself. Even still, I think that most people could do with examining some of the rules that they unknowingly chain themselves to, as well as looking a bit more at some of that unbelievable amount of information available to them – especially after they've been on a lynch that ended up being wrong. At the very least, I think that would be better than immediately jumping to the conclusion that one is always perfectly probability-oriented, because the truth is that's not the case for any of us.

Moment, it is a common phenomenon in many games, of which I think Mafia is one, that good players more often lose because they think they have found an exception to the usual guidelines for good play and are mistaken, than because they followed those guidelines too closely.

read along a bit earlier today but haven't had time to post yet

My proposed 3 for Ico is
{Datisi, notscience, Umlaut}

I absolutely 100% sympathize with where Moment is coming from and I do think we shouldn't just immediately assume NK15 is scum for fake claiming, I intend to revisit his ISO again a bit today and see if I can try to suss out how I'd feel about him independently of that

In post 1155, Umlaut wrote:Moment, it is a common phenomenon in many games, of which I think Mafia is one, that good players more often lose because they think they have found an exception to the usual guidelines for good play and are mistaken, than because they followed those guidelines too closely.

As I said, I think that it's a trait of only the best of the best town players to recognize such a situation, and I don't think that I have that consistent ability myself. That being said, I have done it before.

That being said, I don't think this is relevant to our current predicament, because I don't even think that not considering NK15 as outed scum is "excepting the usual guidelines for good play". If it was, I would have been more specific as it relates to the current game.

In post 1156, GuiltyLion wrote:read along a bit earlier today but haven't had time to post yet

My proposed 3 for Ico is
{Datisi, notscience, Umlaut}

I absolutely 100% sympathize with where Moment is coming from and I do think we shouldn't just immediately assume NK15 is scum for fake claiming, I intend to revisit his ISO again a bit today and see if I can try to suss out how I'd feel about him independently of that

What do you have to say about Norwegian and SomethingSmart? Where are they in your list? Why is Umlaut more scummy to you than any of these two?

In post 1103, notscience wrote:Okay so this dude is probably town

this post (referring to Moment) struck me as notably scummy

notscience has been calling NK15 scum for pretty much the entirety of the game (489, votes him in 905, 929, 942, 946, 954, 961, 1046, 1093), and has also expressed an idea that people defending NK15 - mainly Moment - may be buddies (989, 993, 1001), though he eventually reversed course on this thought (1005).

Meanwhile Moment is pushing against the idea of scum!NK15 or compromise eliminating NK15 throughout, and continues with another long diatribe on this in 1102.

What I hate about this notscience post is that he doesn't really argue with Moment at all, nor bother to indicate that he's re-evaluating his scumread in any sense or even feeling any uncertainty about NK15 whatsoever. and he's already acknowledged that there's good incentives for scum buddies to bus NK15 (if scum), and backed down previously on feeling Moment is scum.

So what's the point of this post? If town!notscience really truly believes NK15 is caught scum, why on earth isn't he arguing with Moment about why we eliminate NK15? if he thinks Moment is town?

IMO this is just scum trying to be funny/charismatic and fit in. If notscience genuinely thinks NK15 is scum, and also genuinely thinks Moment is town, I'm having a hard time understanding why he gives 1102 such a trite response. I think townies are generally compelled to argue for eliminating their scumreads, the timing of this post combined with the lack of any real content or substantive disagreement with Moment just feels way off to me.

In post 1159, Not Known 15 wrote:What do you have to say about Norwegian and SomethingSmart? Where are they in your list? Why is Umlaut more scummy to you than any of these two?

I'm townreading Norway, I'm pretty sure I explained that earlier.

Smart's mostly null to me, I don't have particularly strong reasons to townread him or scumread him. I don't have a ranked 'list', I have players I am fine with eliminated and players I personally wouldn't want eliminated. Smart is in the former group but I also don't especially feel the need to eliminate him.

Umlaut a lot of times feels like he's participating just to participate and argue about mechanics stuff that's easy to argue about, less than actually chasing reads he believes in. His vote on Titus I particularly didn't like, and I've seen virtually no follow up from him on it. I agree with Moment that his recent post felt like he was keeping tabs on who has spewed not-TD. Generally meh vibes throughout.

Why do you expect me to be comparing him to those two in particular? I don't like the way you're trying to box me into doing direct comparisons, that's not really how I like to play especially in a game with 17 players where I'm sure to be off in some of my scumreads (and possibly townreads as well)

In post 932, GuiltyLion wrote:I really cannot say the same about Datisi and as far as I can tell the only reason you've given for the townread is 'playing to town!meta' like... what? What exactly has Datisi done that Datisi doesn't do as scum??

Menalque did you ever answer this

In post 1161, GuiltyLion wrote:

In post 1159, Not Known 15 wrote:What do you have to say about Norwegian and SomethingSmart? Where are they in your list? Why is Umlaut more scummy to you than any of these two?

I'm townreading Norway, I'm pretty sure I explained that earlier.

Smart's mostly null to me, I don't have particularly strong reasons to townread him or scumread him. I don't have a ranked 'list', I have players I am fine with eliminated and players I personally wouldn't want eliminated. Smart is in the former group but I also don't especially feel the need to eliminate him.

Umlaut a lot of times feels like he's participating just to participate and argue about mechanics stuff that's easy to argue about, less than actually chasing reads he believes in. His vote on Titus I particularly didn't like, and I've seen virtually no follow up from him on it. I agree with Moment that his recent post felt like he was keeping tabs on who has spewed not-TD. Generally meh vibes throughout.

Why do you expect me to be comparing him to those two in particular? I don't like the way you're trying to box me into doing direct comparisons, that's not really how I like to play especially in a game with 17 players where I'm sure to be off in some of my scumreads (and possibly townreads as well)

Norway and SomethingSmart are in my group of 3, along with notscience.
However, why is this reasoning you apply to Umlaut not applicable to Smart? When I looked at their ISO I saw almost nothing that resembled reads(except pushing Iconeum for their resistance against me being obvious PA(obviously it didnt turn out that way....), which is LHF), but I saw a lot of mechanics and some fluff. I see more(although still not much) attempts to read and to push the game in Umlauts ISO than in SomethingSmarts ISO.

In post 1065, maxwell wrote:

In post 1064, Maki Harukawa wrote:Despite the mass increase in noise and mech talk my reads shockingly remain mostly untouched. I'll leave the mech play to everyone else I suppose since the lynch is decided on someone I've had at mostly null.

I don't know how you read everything that happened and come away without an opinion. Just bizarre.

I also agree with this, I think this is decent odds to be scum-indicative

it reminds me a lot of a situation I had as scum in Nomination mafia when I came back to the thread after a massive Menalque/RC TvT with Menalque at L-1, and I tried to basically just comment super lightly and peace out and RC immediately caught me for having nothing to say

In post 1162, GuiltyLion wrote:

In post 932, GuiltyLion wrote:I really cannot say the same about Datisi and as far as I can tell the only reason you've given for the townread is 'playing to town!meta' like... what? What exactly has Datisi done that Datisi doesn't do as scum??

Menalque did you ever answer this

I did not, I forgot about it, but I did explain my datisi TR while talking to moment, give me a second and I’ll link you the post

In post 1021, Menalque wrote:I don’t think datisi has done things that should make someone unfamiliar with her TR her, but I think her recent meta has been towards the way she’s playing this game i.e. a bit checked out, and I’ve incorrectly scumread her for it the last couple of games we’ve played. I’m townreading her because I think a couple of the posts she’s made are very natural in the way she’s interacted with me in a way that I’m still not sold she does well as scum. Also, she’s rolled town like, a lot, and to memory her most recent scumgame she was actually much more active and enthusiastic than in her recent towngames.

I think the meta reasons are there for anyone to TR her, but I grant the reason why I’m confident in her being town is specific to me. But I would expect ali and GL to be aware of her recent trends in games seeing as they’re both familiar with her, and so that’s my issue with their scumreads on her.

@GL here

In post 1163, Not Known 15 wrote:However, why is this reasoning you apply to Umlaut not applicable to Smart? When I looked at their ISO I saw almost nothing that resembled reads(except pushing Iconeum for their resistance against me being obvious PA(obviously it didnt turn out that way....), which is LHF), but I saw a lot of mechanics and some fluff. I see more(although still not much) attempts to read and to push the game in Umlauts ISO than in SomethingSmarts ISO.

the thing is Smart often doesn't give reads, especially on D1, like this is how he usually plays. I recently townread him for that and got burned, but it's still not especially scum!indicative for him either.

I'm certainly not gonna complain if Ico puts Smart in the pool, I guess I'm just focusing on Umlaut cause I still really didn't like the timing or reasoning of his Titus vote, that stood out to me. You're acting like I townread Smart, I don't.

@Menalque - fair enough, I guess I don't see the interactions with you as really all that hard to fake, but the point about being more enthusiastic as scum may be worth keeping in mind. I certainly would feel a little disrespected if Datisi thought this was a scum performance worthy of swindling me

GL just look at her two most recent scumgames and any of her recent town games

In her two scum games there’s one where she was super active and controlling the game state and one where she made about 10 posts total

Whereas her recent town games have consistently been like this. And I think you should mostly trust me on this, because I think I have a better chance of correctly interpreting the way datisi is interacting with me than you do from the outside looking in. Unless you think we’re both scum, or unless there’s alternative reasons to think datisi actually is scum later on in the game

In post 1167, GuiltyLion wrote:

In post 1163, Not Known 15 wrote:However, why is this reasoning you apply to Umlaut not applicable to Smart? When I looked at their ISO I saw almost nothing that resembled reads(except pushing Iconeum for their resistance against me being obvious PA(obviously it didnt turn out that way....), which is LHF), but I saw a lot of mechanics and some fluff. I see more(although still not much) attempts to read and to push the game in Umlauts ISO than in SomethingSmarts ISO.

the thing is Smart often doesn't give reads, especially on D1, like this is how he usually plays. I recently townread him for that and got burned, but it's still not especially scum!indicative for him either.

I'm certainly not gonna complain if Ico puts Smart in the pool, I guess I'm just focusing on Umlaut cause I still really didn't like the timing or reasoning of his Titus vote, that stood out to me. You're acting like I townread Smart, I don't.

This explanation is ok.

The more I think about it the more I feel like obvscumming in white flag on day one is a bad play

MAYBE if they were already 100% sure who they were guessing for the win and they want to hurry to that point


But starting day 2 with one partner down, no idea who they should be guessing, and a boatload of tells linking them to they partner? I dunno man




May as well go back to the caught scum

In post 1171, username wrote:a boatload of tells linking them to they partner

Do these exist? I think that if scum NK15 has left very few associative tells.

In post 1172, Something_Smart wrote:

In post 1171, username wrote:a boatload of tells linking them to they partner

Do these exist? I think that if scum NK15 has left very few associative tells.

the entirety of the last X number of pages have been about NK15 or about mechanics, so I'd say that if one looked hard enough, one could find the opinion of nearly everyone about the slot

Are we back on this dumb shit again? Lol.

@hobbes- the defense of him is something I’ve done in the past (before my hiatus so I don’t remember exact games, scumread me for not having quotes idc) as town about someone I thought was town and just /know/ is lynchbait. That’s why I’m townreading him because I’ve done the exact same myself.

I also don’t feel like arguing with a brick wall like I felt it would be, so I’m not bothering tryi to convince him and fill the thread with fucktons of walls like everyone else. It’s okay to agree to disagree on it.

And I’m not wavering on nk because I was the very first to express why skepticism re the claim and I was proven right. So yeah, I’m not reconsidering. Sue me.