Micro 1059: Micro & Normal Stuff | Neighborhood PT

[scamper]

Oh yes, I was interested in hearing what you had to say about that, thank you!! I guess I'm not sure on the difference, exactly. Are you saying that it's better to look for town motivation than scum motivation?

I can believe both of your actions could come from town, or have town motivation. You're both good at being believable town. That's why I townread you both all game. I don't have any trouble convincing myself that any individual post from either of you could come from town. That's why I took the approach that I did, and looked for what could be motivated by being scum.

i'm saying u have to look at the actions of players and ask whether they make sense as coming from town. basically one of the fundamental aspects of the game - "is this person lying or do they really believe what they are saying?". you have to ask whether what people are doing

makes sense

. the thing about your approach is that it assumes scum *will be doing a certain thing* and that is purely a guess, it has no foundation in anything concrete. scum can take any number of approaches to a situation, they can play optimally or unoptimally, there is rarely a concrete example of "scum would play things this way" because the entire goal as scum is subverting peoples expectations and what people expect is variable so you cant assume something like "scum would have been trying to push a ML here", for instance. maybe they wanted to keep their hands clean, maybe they didn't feel there was a good case to push. you don't know the answer. trying to guess at what exactly scum were plotting is a fool's errand. (i have a similar issue with wagonomics and vca type reasoning - they rely on a lot of unfounded assumptions about how scum will be playing)

[Coral]

I see what you're saying (and I've heard these arguments before), but I don't really think it's any easier for me to predict what makes sense for town than it is to predict what makes sense for scum. I think I do both, depending on the situation. Town people are honest, yes, but they are human and they are often weird and confusing and irrational and I don't understand them or why they do the things that they do. Town is working towards the goal of finding scum, and scum is working towards the goals of eliminating town and not being found. Either way, you're predicting how the player will try to achieve that goal.

Sometimes it's easy to see that what someone does makes sense, and is genuinely felt, and believes what they're saying. I agree that should generally be the first step to sorting people. But if the players are very good at faking that, and everything on the surface looks like it could come from town, then what next? My usual approach is to try to look at things from the other direction.

I do appreciate the advice, I don't think I'm at all an excellent town player, and am always trying to improve.

[Coral]

I guess my point is that I actually tend to find it easier for me to get confbiased on someone being town, and being able to easily fit any of their actions into a town mindset. I by nature read the majority of posts as town, even if they're from someone I scumread. So me considering if there's a believable reason that something could come from scum is me trying to break my way out of that.