[LURKERS] Sweet 16: Civ Party Fun Time and Philosophical Debate

[darrelljs]

Did you just attempt to quantify human behavior through maths? Never a bad thing!

We should build an online dating service around it.

Darrell

[Commodore]

Did you just attempt to quantify human behavior through maths? Never a bad thing!

We should build an online dating service around it.

Darrell

You thought your online dating service was a sausage fest? Just wait until you see this one based on Civ4 discussions...

[SevenSpirits]

I can't see how you can read an advocacy for universal defection into the above even at a stretch. At most, you could read my phrase as asserting that one should be prepared for universal defection, because I missed out 'reasonable' before 'aggression'. My bad, it was implied, I did not mean to say that you should be prepared against all possible types of aggression all the time. There is of course a whole other discussion about what would constitute reasonable aggression, albeit I think we agree that committing 100+ hammers for a bunch of peripheral coastal razes in the first 100 turns of the game is not reasonable (edit: outside of special circumstances, like a duel).

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm not reading into your writing that you support defection as a concept, I'm making an analogy between very mild negative sum actions in civ and choosing the "defect" option in an iterated prisoner's dilemma. In this case these very mild negative sum actions are as simple as building a unit. If I build an additional unit to position near our mutual borders, both of our positions get a little bit worse but I get a little bit of an advantage over you.

[Ilios]

All the discussion in this thread made me think of this.

[Bobchillingworth]

My go-to approach for resolving disputes is to put everyone to sleep. People are so happy at sleep!

My first reaction when I saw human behavior in a Civ game reduced to variables was to slip into a brief coma, but I actually enjoyed your post quite a bit, despite being almost functionally math illiterate.


Of course you missed out on the all-important BOREDAGGx factor


Obviously the reality of aggression in non-AW Civ MP is a little bit more complicated than a selection of discrete subsets of behavior. One could easily envision the scenario where aggression triggered by A settling a certain location close to B leads to a second conflict between the same parties later, if the initial war leaves A weak enough to be an easy target for B.

[Bacchus]

I should point out that the above is simply an attempt to state precisely what we mean by a player being "aggressive" or "having a propensity to attack". Gavagai seemed to interpret that descriptions of aggressiveness as implying some sort of emotional or psychological basis, whilst others were apparently talking about the purely statistical observation of a player being prone to choosing the aggressive path in a larger proportion of possible situations for whatever reason. Conversely, others were asserting the existence of a quality of general aggressiveness, that is a propensity to choose more aggressive actions across different types of situations; and based on this asserted quality they were making predictions of future aggressive behaviour in general, based on manifest acts of specific aggression. Gavagai was pointing out (correctly, to my mind) that a specific choice of aggression over peace in a particular situation by a player tells us more about the situation, than about the player. I just tried to bring these statements to a common analytic basis to understand where precisely the disagreement in logic is.

Plus, I just love possible world semantics for expressing modal claims.

[Goreripper]

Gavagai was pointing out (correctly, to my mind) that a specific choice of aggression over peace in a particular situation by a player tells us more about the situation, than about the player. I just tried to bring these statements to a common analytic basis to understand where precisely the disagreement in logic is.

Plus, I just love possible world semantics for expressing modal claims.

This makes sense. But I bet you a dollar PEACE outcomes and AGG outcomes do depend more on the particular player X than on the particular situation un.

[Bacchus]

I guess it depends on situation. I have no problem agreeing that there are situations that can be played out either peacefully (and well) and agressively (and well), the choice lying with the player. On the other hand, how many players do you know that faced with Egypt's situation in PB12 would NOT have considered aggressing southwards as a major part of their strategy? Conversely, how many would have focused on early war out of Maya's situation in PB8?

I'd say the situation provides the post and reasonableness the leash which together delimit the circle you can wander around in — whence you stray within the radius is personality based, but unless you are unphased by blatant suboptimality, that radius is not going to be too large in most cases.

[suttree]

But... but... what if an observer's predilection to explain behaviour by referencing either the player or the situation is itself attributable to either the observer himself (his temperament) or the obsever's situation (the fact of the matter)??? It seems, in Civ4, before one gets down to dealing with what really matters, namely, the actual playing of the game in pursuit of a victory condition, it would first be necessary to reach prior agreement about decison making, namely, about whether it is to be viewed either as the product of a temperament with which the player himself takes possession of the state of the game, or as the means by which he catches an immediate glimpse of the situation and translates it in to action. There is a certain unease about this which seems in part justified because there are various kinds of decision making, and it could well be that one of them, rather than another, would be better suited to winning a game of Civ4 and that a wrong choice among them is thereby possible – in part this unease is justified because decision making is a faculty of a determinate kind and extent, and without a more precise determination of its nature and limits, we might end up grasping vaporous clouds of error instead of entering into the heaven of a victory condition. This unease is even bound to be transformed into the conviction both that the entire project of explaining behaviour by way of a reference to decision making is, in its very concept, absurd, and that there is a sharp line separating decision making from human behaviour. This is so because if we suppose behaviour to be solely the product of a certain temperament or instrument by means of which the player takes hold of the situation, then it is obvious that if we apply an instrument to something, the application does not in fact leave it be as it is on its own; rather, it sets out to reshape it and change it. Or, if decision making is not the application of a certain temperament but is to some extent a passive medium through which the situation is cognized in the light of the truth and translated in to action, then here too we do not explain the behaviour as it is in itself but only as it comes to us through this medium and in the medium. In both cases, we employ a means which immediately engenders the very opposite of its intended purpose, that is, the very absurdity of the enterprise lies in our making use of any means at all. To be sure, it seems that this evil stands to be remedied by means of a cognition of the way the matter of "temperament" works, for such a cognition would make it possible to peel away in the behaviour the part of the decision which we receive by virtue of the temperament from that part which belongs to the situation, and thus we would receive the behaviour in its purity. However, this improvement would in fact merely bring us back to where we were before. If we once again subtract from the reshaped thing what the temperament has added to it, then the thing – here, the behaviour – is once again for us exactly as it was prior to this fully superfluous effort. However much we were just supposed to bring the behaviour a bit closer to us by means of the temperament and not have the temperament change anything in it at all, perhaps similar to the way we would ensnare a bird on a twig covered in birdlime, the behaviour itself would nonetheless almost surely cast scorn on this ruse if it were not both in and for itself already there with us and wanted to be there. In that case, decision making itself would merely be a ruse, since all its efforts would only amount to its putting on airs about doing something which is quite different from engendering a merely immediate and thereby trouble-free relation. Or if in the examination and testing of decision making, which we represent as a medium, we learn about the law of its refraction, then it is also equally useless to subtract this refraction from the result, for it is not the refraction of the ray but rather the ray itself by way of which the situation comes into contact with us, and if this is subtracted, then all it would point to would be either a pure direction or empty location.

[Hashoosh]

Paragraphs are not the enemy