Mafia Debate: Behavioral Analysis On D1

Re: Definitions, etc. If something is irrational, it is baseless. There is no reason for it being so – it, by definition, has no grounding in reality, so it has no restraints and cannot be said to be any less random (in the sense that it has no underlying method or deterministic necessity) than a dice roll. If something is random, it, by definition, cannot be motivated by the wincons of town or scum, which are, as my opponent admits, the main determinators of the differences between the plays of the factions, so random actions cannot be analyzed to find the affiliation of the actor. This is my argument summed up: P.1 That which is random cannot be known to be aimed neither for town nor scum P.2 Town DP1 actions are random C.1 Town DP1 actions cannot be known to be aimed neither for town nor scum P.3 For behavioral analysis of actions to be useful, there must be a distinction between factions – it must be knowable that town must aim its actions for town and scum for scum P.4 It is not knowable that town aims its actions for town on DP1 C.2 Behavioral analysis is not useful on DP1 The “facts” my opponents claim provide a basis for reads do no such thing, as how they are represented to every player does not allow the motives behind them to be objectively and absolutely revealed. If the motives cannot be seen, then reads based on them are baseless, by definition, since there would be no base and no reason to make any evaluations one way or another from them. == Re: What if town always play randomly? == Finding which actions are town-sided can only be done if the players that make up town are already known. From the perspective of a town player on DP1, no action can be known to be pro-town or pro-scum prior to a flip. As such, you cannot base reads off of this – to base reads off of pro-town actions, you would have to first be able to read players to determine which actions are pro-town, and to do that you would have to have already established a standard to read people by, etc. to infinity. This is clearly absurd. == Re: Begging The Question == “This is bossy's argument: "Town and mafia behave the same because town play randomly. Town play randomly because they cannot distinguish town behaviors from mafia behaviors. Town cannot distinguish town behaviors from mafia behaviors because town and mafia play the same." “ It is a truth that, because of the very nature of town (being uninformed players), there is no solid basis for reads. This is not circular – my conclusion is based on this near-a-priori fact about the game. There is no justification for the idea that an individual townie having information regarding himself is enough for him to pass any judgements on the alignments of other players, and, if this is so, any such judgements must be random. My opponent’s argument is predicated on the idea that “Town need not fake reads”. I have shown this to beg the question – for town to do anything other than “fake” (pull out of thin air) reads, they must first be able to read in the first place, which is absurd if the entire justification for reads even existing is that townies do not fake reads. It’s entirely circular. It doesn’t matter what town and mafia have as goals – what matters is if you’re able to distinguish between the actions each take to reach those goals. Since I have shown that Town acts randomly, distinguishment of this sort is impossible, and, as such, my opponent’s case collapses. My opponent’s examples are irrelevant if he is not able to show a causal link between behavioral analysis and winning. He has only shown a correlation, which is not sufficient to rebut my arguments. == Re: How to start D1? == If random events cannot be evaluated to determine whether they were caused by Town or Scum, no player would be able to react to them in any meaningful way. If there was an equal chance that a post was made by scum or by town, then for the responses to be non-random the only possibility is that players respond the same to town and scum posts, which is, in itself, damning for the idea of responses containing affiliation information. If players respond differently to town and scum posts, but had no way of finding out which was which, they would literally have to flip a coin to determine what their reaction would be. This is equally damning. It doesn’t matter who people “think” are mafia – what matters is what they actually post, and the reasons for posting what they post are essentially random.