The worrying observation I make from Traitors is how easily a group of about a dozen people can become so sure of guilt on so little evidence, and time after time of being knowingly wrong. What if anything can we learn from this to understand the jury system and prosecutorial process?
Also, I have watched a bunch of series and I have not once noticed anyone click the obvious “hack”: the last person to enter the breakfast room after a kill night is almost always a faithful, because of the TV cliffhanger of viewers hanging on which of two faithful survived. It’s the best truth signal the game gives and I’ve never seen a player mention it. Maybe TV edits the knowledge out.
I do wonder how much meta gaming is going on though. As a faithful, given that new traitors are recruited, your goal isn't actually to eliminate a traitor but to survive, ideally knowing who the remaining the traitors are at the end (and making sure they don't end up in a majority at any point too). If you are confident that somebody is a traitor, there is something to be said for keeping them as a traitor so you know who the traitors are at the end.
I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished. It is quite scary how they latch onto tiny things and become convinced. I suspect that as soon as the faithful feel they are being targeted, they feel pressured and act in ways that reinforce everybody's ideas about them. Defensiveness gets interpreted as guilt very easily.
It's really hard to know whether this transfers to the jury system. It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences. To me juries feel like the 'least worst' way to make such decisions and you do need to be unanimous or extremely close to unanimous if the judge gives permission for that.
I wondered about the order of entry at breakfast too, but I've read that they film the scene in multiple permutations so they can't just figure it out from that. I don't know if that is accurate that film different permutations, but I find it hard to believe that nobody has cottoned on to the idea that the last couple of people in are faithful.
> I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished
tbf, they're also strongly incentivised to look surprised and disappointed when a faithful is banished.
And for that matter to latch on to someone else's wild suspicions even if they're daft, because if that person's theory turns out to be wrong (or even if it's right!), you're unlikely to be the person targeted for going along with it. Jury service doesn't come with the expectation that you're likely to be voted out by teammates or "murdered" if you come up with a decent counterargument or spot something tangible that nobody else does.
> It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences.
I served on a criminal trial jury (U.S.) for 3 weeks and when the trial was over, there was no restriction on who I could talk to or what I could say about the experience.
Ditto, lengthy trial with a hung jury. Judge instructed us that we were permitted but not required to talk after we left, although there might have been an admonition about personal information of other jurors.
I tried to give useful feedback to both of the lawyers, since I suspect neither of them were really happy with the mistrial outcome.
An important difference is that a jury acquittal is not saying you think the defendant is innocent, but rather that the evidence did not establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocence is assumed.
You could think somebody is probably guilty but also feel obligated to acquit them. For a famous example I somehow doubt all the OJ Simpson jurors thought he was innocent, but he was acquitted nonetheless.
>Indeed, and I suspect as more people learn about jury nullification, the world will grow more just.
One would hope, but back in the day it was a powerful tool to do the opposite where juries disagreeing with the law would find minorities guilty when they obviously weren't.
Appeals are generally based on erroneous judge's decisions, mostly pre-trial, but sometimes things like evidence foundation and objections during trial.
Appellate courts very rarely touch jury decisions. I know someone who was found guilty at trial and a week later a jury member wrote a letter saying she was persuaded to change her "not guilty" verdict by two other jury members who hadn't declared their relationship to each other, were using their cellphones in the jury room and had looked up the criminal history of the defendant in the newspapers (which turned out to be completely wrong). Even with that letter the trial court said it didn't affect the verdict, but in this case the appeals court made the rare decision to overrule. Interestingly they mentioned a racial issue too: "where a juror makes a clear statement that indicates he or she relied on racial stereotypes or animus to convict a criminal defendant, the Sixth Amendment requires that the no-impeachment rule give way in order to permit the trial court to consider the evidence of the juror's statement and any resulting denial of the jury trial guarantee."
Also the [general] requirement for a unanimous vote to convict makes this form of juror action quite uncommon. By contrast a single juror can cause a jury to be unable to convict.
I think most people has a very low capacity for living with uncertainty. They much rather believe something random, e.g. whatever religion (or conspiracy theory) at hand, than admit that they can't know.
Uncertainty is demanding as it requires you to look at things from multiple angles/reasons and evaluate all options. It is much cheaper to just select a default reason. This is especially true for creating social cohesion in a group.
This. For all of the hate the rationalist movement gets they’re effectively teaching people to be comfortable with uncertainty. It worked for me- I don’t consider myself a rationalist, but do feel comfortable noticing “I’m not sure about this because I have limited evidence- which is the right way to feel about it.”
I don't think they actually are. I think that this is instead actually a convenient story that people in the community tell themselves and others because it makes people feel smart.
Going Infinite is a clear example of being fooled by this. SBF says he is actings on all of this bayesian probability stuff and Michael Lewis falls for it, concluding that SBF is actually thinking more clearly and rationally than the rest of us when actually SBF is just a flake and goes back on his commitments because he doesn't really care.
They are accused of being basically a doomsday cult for intellectuals with an extreme fanatical focus on AI doomerism.
They also have a huge number of really unusual social norms including using their own ultra nerdy lingo with lots of obscure fiction references in regular life, widespread polyamory - and often vocal disapproval of monogamy, outspoken rejection of sexual norms including group sex parties and raising kids communally in polyamorous group homes, rejection of all political correctness, and willingness to discuss normally taboo topics in casual conversation.
In a lot of ways it reminds me of the beatniks- they're basically throwing out all of the existing culture, and trying to create something entirely new by trial and error, sometimes with quite bad results.
I've learned an awful lot of good ideas from the community that I've applied directly in my career as a scientist, and attended a few events in person, but personally wasn't able to connect with the people, I always felt like an outsider and I also found a lot of their blatant rejection and reinvention of virtually all social norms somewhat disturbing in person. There are also a lot of really kind, open minded, and brilliant people in the community- and I personally think most of their concerns over AI are well founded, but not everyone agrees.
It sounds like your primary critique here is that "rationalist" communities overlap in membership with other communities that have other, not strictly related, inclinations. That may be so, but I'm not sure it's relevant -- if a bowling league's membership consists primarily of Mormons, I still wouldn't interpret criticism of Mormon theology as being relevant to discussions of bowling.
I wouldn't characterize the rationalists as just a loose knit online community with a common interest in rational thinking that happen to overlap with some other unusual interests- but as a real life community and culture - centered around a particular group of people mostly in the Northern California "East Bay Area" with a very unusual lifestyle and social norms they've collectively invented within the movement, that includes all of what I mentioned as central aspects. It's a broad social experiment of trying to reinvent everything "rationally" instead of just doing what their culture or parents taught them.
I find that post hilarious, because the polling your friends and doing statistics on it thing is even more stereotypically rationalist than polyamory itself, but they conclude from poll data that most of the rationalists came to polyamory from within the movement itself, not from an existing or outside interest in it.
There is a larger international group of people that participate remotely and don't relocate or adopt the full lifestyle, but it would be a mistake to think of that as something that exists entirely separately, or would exist at all without that core community.
I'm confused then -- if you aren't construing the larger community of people following these ideas and participating remotely as being separate from the "core" group, then how do the more unusual lifestyles that only the "core" group follow describe the entirety of it?
The way you're describing it seems similar to looking at the lifestyles of monastic orders within the Catholic church as indicative of the way Catholics live generally.
I was actually thinking of the same exact analogy- of having a monastic order and lay people with varying levels of commitment, but didn't put it in my reply because I couldn't think of a clear way to not overuse the analogy.
Nobody would say the Catholics are a group of lay religious people that also happen for some reason to overlap in membership with another unrelated group that enjoys monastic lifestyles. The monastic lifestyle is a central key part of the religion, even if it isn't what every Catholic chooses to do. It doesn't describe the entirety of the religion either. Both the core group that follow the full lifestyle together in person, and more distant or less involved participants are all together the same movement- with both the Catholics and Rationalists.
Importantly- when one criticizes the actions of Catholic monastics, it is considered relevant as criticism of the entire organization and religion, unlike the bowling example you gave. People do rightfully blame the Catholics for things like the Spanish Inquisition, and for protecting child abusers and rapists in their monastic communities, even if the average lay person had no involvement in these beyond supporting the religion financially and socially.
One could be a Mormon and fundamentally disapprove of bowling, even if a lot of other Mormons do it, but you probably aren't going to make it as a Catholic if you think monastic lifestyles are immoral or harmful. You probably won't make it as a rationalist either if you think things like utilitarian ethics, and nonmonogamy are immoral or harmful.
You've made a good argument here -- I'll have to consider it further.
I suppose I'm trying to separate the "rationalist" ideas, interpreted as a methodology of reasoning, from the normative positions that some communities advancing those methods have converged upon, even where the application of that reasoning methodology might have been involved in forming those other positions.
I do think that devotion to AI eschatology, nonmonogamy, and utilitarianism do not necessarily proceed merely from rational inquiry, and require additional normative or empirical precepts as inputs, many of which may have circulated in those communities in parallel to the discourse on reasoning. So that's sort of what the Mormon/bowling analogy was getting at.
"The rationalists" don't own rationality. I don't think the specific community of people I'm talking about that call themselves rationalists have a monopoly on actually teaching practical rational thinking, although they do have some very good materials that explain a lot of valuable ideas and concepts, which I am grateful for.
From their own philosophy, they claim that "rationality is systematized winning" and everyone I've known that decided to focus their life around any of the 3 things you mentioned above, had consequences that were close to the exact opposite of "systematized winning."
It's worth noting that basically every major founding member of the "Rationalist" community was, in fact, part of these other communities. While I don't normally consider criticism of Mormon theology relevant to bowling, it does seem relevant to critiquing the Mormon Bowling League of Utah.
I personally find all those norms refreshing, mind you. I'm just saying this is a place where they're really intractably interwoven. I'd assume if bowling was invented by Mormons, there'd be a lot of people thrown off when the word "Jesus" shows up in the section on evaluating strikes. Similarly, many people are thrown off when reading about statistics and it suddenly concludes God is dead and you should be polyamorous.
Mostly it’s way too full of itself. “Here’s how to think to be less wrong” (to borrow the name of one of the main sites) gives way to “since we know how to think, we’re smarter than everyone else.” Techniques like Bayesian inference get used to put a mathematical veneer on total guesswork or rationalize what the person wants to do anyway.
Take longtermism, for example. This is a segment of the rationalist community that focuses on doing the most good for humanity in the very long term. The basic idea goes: if humanity is able to get off this planet and go colonize the galaxy, there are untold quintillions of additional lives that would be lived. But that future is uncertain. Something that increases the chances of it happening by 0.1% would have an expected value of saving quadrillions of lives. If you can increase these chances by one in a trillion, that’s worth orders of magnitude more than saving a child’s life right now.
This is sound thinking so far. A fun little thought experiment. The problem is that you can’t rigorously apply it practically. Predicting the future of humanity is hard and probabilities assigned to various events aren’t rigorous. In practice, this mindset either leads to fairly obvious conclusions like that it’s important to fight climate change, or it’s off the wall stuff like being obsessed with AI safety. And the veneer of math produces an attitude that anyone who disagrees is not only wrong, but provably wrong in a mathematical fashion, which doesn’t tend to endear.
The rationalist idea of doing morality as math with utilitarian consequentialism always seemed dangerous and a big mistake to me. It is easy to rationalize things that are obviously awful or absurd from common sense, and not meaningfully consistent with normal human experience or human brains and motivations. SBF for example justified all of his crimes with rationalist logic.
I'm not going to walk past a drowning kid in a lake so I can urgently go to a nerd meeting planning to save a quintillion imaginary sci-fi distant future kids - even if some made up math says the expected value of the meeting is a thousand times higher.
Fundamentally, I do have deontological ethics- I think the ancient stoics basically had morality/ethics right, and admire people that take a Socrates like stand on doing what is right on principle even in the face of manipulative people trying to control you by creating bad consequences.
It’s not just dangerous, but plainly incorrect in most cases.
It’s the usual GIGO problem. These arguments almost always start with a bunch of completely made-up numbers. It doesn’t matter how good the math is, the results will be useless.
It can work. When a government regulator decides whether to mandate some new safety equipment and after rigorous technical analysis concludes that it would result in net lives lost and so doesn’t require it, that’s sensible. But thats not what happens here.
I occasionally see this problem acknowledged, but even then, the given error bars are way too small and then it’s just full steam ahead anyway.
It could be dangerous anyway, but this makes it even more so.
Yeah, I think it is literally provably 'optimal' if you can execute it correctly with informative data, don't forget or omit any important considerations, and aren't just making up BS- all of which are almost always impossible for regular humans in real life no matter how much 'rationality training' they've had. It makes sense both for optimal behavior of some hypothetical superintelligent AI to realize its own goals efficiently, or for something like a government to weigh pros and cons of a difficult regulatory choice with well defined short term consequences - neither of which are anything like the everyday morality decisions humans make.
I take an even more sour view of this thought process. I don't actually think that SBF did the math and concluded that rationality justified his crimes. I think that he wanted to do those crimes and then, consciously or unconsciously, spread the veneer of rationality over them as a form of self-justification.
I think that a community that engages in brute math with unbounded values for priors to justify action would be worrisome. By choosing the right priors you can conclude almost anything. But I actually think that it is just roughly the same decision making that the rest of the world makes, with an unusual post-facto justification that also feeds one's ego.
It seems like that to me as well- that the whole thing can be a manipulative way to make what you wanted to do anyways seem somehow objectively correct. Which is basically the postmodernist criticism of any attempt to use logic or science for anything- and in some cases is valid.
I imagine that the leader of the Singularity Institute (now Center for Applied Rationality) using the workshops as a recruitment ground for his personal psychedelic drug cult, and his followers then killing a bunch of innocent people, did not do any favors to their perception among the wider public [1].
(This is about the SF Bay Area subculture dubbed the rationalists, obviously not related to the philosophical moment of the same name, critiqued by Kant in the late 18th century)
Unless very extreme circumstances apply and a judge orders a jury not to talk, people on juries are generally allowed to talk about what happened after the fact. However, there are often very strict rules on soliciting jury members to talk to you and courts give jury members quite a bit of anonymity protection so that they can exercise their right not to speak about high-profile cases.
Generally, Jurors who want to talk about it in public are few and far between because there is no upside and a lot of downside.
> the last person to enter the breakfast room after a kill night is almost always a faithful
Never trust the order things happen in reality tv. They will show reaction shots to completely different things, mess up the order of shots, cut things completely out of order, etc, to drive a narrative.
A friend was in one of those reality Amazing Races program, where another couple's husband was quite vilified; she said actually he was ok, but somehow they managed to get every single time he blew up and stitched it together to make him seem really terrible.
I don’t think it’s fair to carry this to the justice system. This is a forced scenario where they have to pick one AND invent the evidence - they’re the jury, judge, and executioner. The justice system waits until someone is suspected of something and then eventually they go through the system, where laws and procedures have been created to try and remove unfair processes. Juries are given explicit instructions about what can and cannot be considered, evidence can be thrown out on a technicality, etc.
Conviction rates are all over the place [1] depending on state, where in some places (like MA) you’re more likely to not be charged than charged. Of course the opposite exists too. Most people (97%) who are charged with federal crimes plead guilty, suggesting that most of them did in fact do it (yes some may not feel like they could win even if innocent, but that won’t be the majority). The innocence project estimates between 1-10% of people are wrongly incarcerated - this is a strong minority of the people and a hit rate that’s way better than traitors.
Unlike traitors, there are definitions for beyond a reasonable doubt, requiring hard evidence, etc.
I think traitors actually argues FOR our current justice system - look what happens when you remove all the rules and procedures, instead just allowing mob rule.
The thing that stood out to me was how, particularly in the first season, when people had no idea what to grab onto they just grabbed onto the first vague suggestion they heard and, not only that, did so with very few dissenters.
I think this is the mechanism propaganda takes advantage of. Where there's a gap in people's understanding, they can very easily inject their version of events into people's heads and people will broadly accept it. The knowledge vacuum wants to be filled when pushed for a decision. In fact it doesn't even need to be this highly overt form that we saw in the 20th century dictatorships, even relatively weak forms can still grip hard and then people are reluctant to walk back from them after the fact.
Some would accuse faithfuls of potentially being traitors merely for voting differently to how the group had done previously, on tenuous information, even though they had no idea whether the person they voted for was a traitor or not! Here we see how, when intentionally directed, propaganda can sustain the creation of the scapegoats out of those who dissent.
It seems there's a psychological trait of people accepting and repeating others ideas while others will keep tickling for more information. In business settings I've seen very educated people start to repeat the behavior and ideas of other less competent people, which I assume was the pressure of having something to do or say to fill in blanks, and that starts the process.
A guy from my town was on the Traitors and did attempt to take advantage of the loophole you mentioned and they almost entirely edited him out of the series.
My spouse and I are avid consumers of the series and we have been hypothesizing on and off why 1-2 game participants each season get almost no screen time whatsoever. Originally we thought it might simply be that the people in question make boring television. This is another possibility we had not even entertained - that the producers were punishing people for meta-gaming.
Based on my knowledge of the show and commentary around its filming, it does seem genuinely mostly unscripted - which means that producers are probably reaching for other mechanisms to control dialogue and contestant behavior and probably threatening screen time for breaking the 4th wall is an effective one.
It’s hard to know how much of the time they actually believe someone is guilty, vs just going along with the group, though. There’s a strong incentive to vote with the group because otherwise if someone is a traitor you look suspicious. And if the conversation is going after one person and that isn’t you, you’d like it to stay that way.
I don’t think it necessarily reflects how a jury etc works. If you acquit, you don’t have to choose someone else to accuse. You’re not going to face accusations yourself. You don’t have to repeat the process every day.
On your second point, I’m sure the UK second season changed the order to eliminate that, but it’s back this season. I’m sure a player mentioning it would be edited out though, so it’s hard to know if anyone assumes it’s still the case.
Yes. Another disincentive for finding a traitor in the first half of the game is that they just get replaced, and you get a target on your back. A good playing strategy is to be just vocal enough, with some open opinions.
I've only watched the Australian seasons of the Traitors, but they're so heavily weighted in favour of the traitors, I don't see how the faithful can win.
I would even go as far as to say politics, and extends to society as a whole. Repeat a lie for long enough, others will begin to believe it as a truth, and if you can convince a person they will benefit personally, they are more than willing to forgo decency and morality in favor of personal benefits. Of course, in this case people are given an excuse for this behavior under the guise of a “game”.
It would be interesting if fans edited the episodes into a "contestant viewpoint only" version that removed the TV viewer's perspective and allowed viewers to play along without knowledge of the traitors.
Yes, this is exactly why groups of people make me genuinely scared. You can't use logic to argue with them.
When I was a kid there were shows where people would work together on challenges and vote out the least helpful team member, and a friend of mine said once "as a kid I already noticed that in these shows it's not the best person that wins, but the most clever and cunning".
I agree with you, but in fact I have nurtured within myself a healthy skepticism that, so far, has protected me from scams, etc. I feel like skepticism is a powerful weapon against propaganda.
Ask yourself, "Does that person have something to gain by lying?" "Yes" should immediately raise a red flag and you can go from there.
> The worrying observation I make from Traitors is how easily a group of about a dozen people can become so sure of guilt on so little evidence, and time after time of being knowingly wrong.
I agree, some of the theories they come up with are insane and I feel like this (UK) season in particular is characterised by a lot of tribalism and anti-intellectualism.
Against that, we have to remember that the aim of the show is to be as entertaining as possible to as many people as possible. Interpersonal drama is more popular than explorations of game theory, so I suspect casting was based on who would be the most entertaining rather than the best at the game. I also think the editing plays a big role in presenting viewers with a particular narrative. They can probably quite easily cast people as being good or bad, smart or stupid.
Personally I have always thought the game was inherently quite stacked in the traitors' favour. Ultimately information is absolutely crucial to the game, and the traitors have a lot more of it (at the start of the game, they are arguably the only ones who have any at all).
“Almost always”. If the entries were completely randomised this would still be the case, since the murdered are always faithful and the majority of the remaining are faithful. There could well be some production bias but it’s not the cheat code you’re making it to be. Traitors can and will enter last.
It's pretty rare, like any guessing game there are advantages and on the whole traitors entering last as I believe happened less often than the percentage of traitors to faithfuls would allow if it was randomised.
My cofounder Zak and I were on a show called "Planet of the Apps" by Apple, many years ago. I met Jessica Alba, Gwenyth Paltrow, Will-I-Am, and Gary Vaynerchuk.
I can tell you that a lot of these shows are staged. They tell you to "react like X" and then film you again and say "react like Y" and they slice and dice footage to show whatever they want. In the case of that show, they completely edited us out of the final show.
So it's not really easy for contestants to "sneak something past the censors" :)
This reminds me of a party game I played once called Mafia, which is a bit like Among Us but played verbally. I was a bit drunk, and the designated villain was very socially adroit, which I most certainly am not. The villain easily convinced the other players I was the villain, on the basis, I think, simply of his charisma and perceived trustworthiness.
I was struck by how readily the other players followed what seemed like blatantly manipulative suggestions in a game where you know the goal is deception.
Also, I have watched a bunch of series and I have not once noticed anyone click the obvious “hack”: the last person to enter the breakfast room after a kill night is almost always a faithful, because of the TV cliffhanger of viewers hanging on which of two faithful survived. It’s the best truth signal the game gives and I’ve never seen a player mention it. Maybe TV edits the knowledge out.