Less Wronger argues that Magic the Gathering competitive scene and the rational community are important to the world with their "culture of clear and effective thinking"

u/DELETED 53 points at 1621433375.000000

[deleted]

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u/nodying 16 points at 1621439106.000000

> This may allow for an experience more amenable to Bayesian analysis, and will weed out the casuals who are merely here for “fun” Is that one of the pillars of the rationalist experience, trying to subsume everything into a Great Work like all the big names pretend to be doing with their time and the donations of ghouls/suckers? Because one thing I have noticed around all this weird writing is how much they've resurrected a taboo against "idleness" and stuff that doesn't have some superficial moral instruction or social "improvement" aspect.

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u/eaton 13 points at 1621477218.000000

Reminds me a lot of the Evangelical world's starved relationship to artistic expression; the relentless drumbeat of "all creative endeavors must be directed in some way towards the goals of worship or evangelism" produced decades of *really terrible art.*

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u/snowylion 3 points at 1621508634.000000

All cults have their "great projects"

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u/wallofsneer 14 points at 1621439607.000000

Yeah this is weird. Xmage and Cockatrice have been around for years now, and the most competitive scene is on MTGO anyway. The Pro Tour was never more than an advertising stunt I also lol'd at "clear and effective thinking", this dude has clearly never tried to understand layers

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u/Ascimator 9 points at 1621610293.000000

The trick to understanding layers is convincing your opponent you understand layers so they don't bother calling a judge.

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u/Soyweiser 3 points at 1621614643.000000

Layers is a bit after my time, have a short explaination for it? I just remember the weirdness about instant/sorcery etc stuff.

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u/repe_sorsa 6 points at 1621622146.000000

The way you resolve the interactions between like a billion different cards printed over the years is by referring to a huge document called the comprehensive rules, which establishes a programming language like system for how everything in the game is structured. Most peoples won't care or need to know much about it, but it's a genuinely impressive feat how well it gets all the accumulated weird shit to work together. One of the bigger chunks of it is Interaction of Continuous Effects, which resolves situations like, if there's a card that turns a land into a creature, and another one that says all creatures get +1/+1, does the latter apply to a land affected by the first one? There are a few different considerations that might come to play depending on the effects in question, but the main one is that depending on what they do these get sorted into different "layers", which get applied in a specific order, and in this example the answer would be yes because type-changing effects go in a layer that gets applied before the one that power and toughness changing effects go in. Layers being inscrutable is a meme that stems from some of the biggest rules headaches happening in their area. Like try looking up Humility, Opalescence, Life and Limb, and Conspiracy, and imagine being tasked with crafting a rules system that neatly resolves all possible interactions between those. In simple cases they really aren't that hard to understand, at least by the standards of the rest of the comprehensive rules, which are intended as more of a judge resource for tournaments and not as something for every kitchen table player to refer to.

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u/Soyweiser 3 points at 1621625616.000000

Ah, this makes me happy I stopped playing. Looking at the URL (posted by somebody else) this quickly reaches 'this would work a lot better when played on a computer' levels of complexity.

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u/repe_sorsa 5 points at 1621628649.000000

It really isn't something you need to be familiar with, the trickier interactions rarely come up and even your average tournament player won't have studied the comprehensive rules and will just ask the judge as needed. Most of the really annoying cards are old anyway, and if anything the various rules overhauls made them much easier to figure out compared to mess the early editions's rules were. You aren't wrong about working better on a computer though, that's the route taken by any new games these days and even Magic has been shifting its focus towards the online implementation. A related trend is that the newer games go with simple representation first and consistency second, which only works because instead of the players having to figure out the outcome, they can just press buttons and see what happens. Hearthstone especially is notorious for cards not fully spelling out what they do and having weird interactions, and turns out very few people mind.

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u/Ascimator 3 points at 1621615431.000000

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/layer-system-2009-11-05

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u/Soyweiser 1 points at 1621625627.000000

Thanks!

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u/Shitgenstein 43 points at 1621432509.000000

Dying Wizard.

One Colorless and two Blue Mana.

Sacrifice Dying Wizard: Exile clear and effective thinking.

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u/Quietuus 11 points at 1621505867.000000

Legal in all formats but no one wants to play it.

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u/DELETED 42 points at 1621438311.000000

I have played Magic socially and (rarely) competitively since I was a kid. There are a lot of clever, smart, social, well-adjusted people in that community.

They just happen to have exactly zero overlap with the overly serious fucksticks who write self-congratulatory shit like this. Those guys were very consistently awful to be around, especially if you weren’t a massive brain-genius like them.

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u/N0_B1g_De4l 30 points at 1621440049.000000

Ironically, thinking “Professional Magic Player” was ever a viable career path is a sign you’re not thinking clearly and effectively. Even at its most lucrative, the professional circuit never paid out enough in prizes to be worth it. Professional Magic Players made their money as content creators, not players.

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u/repe_sorsa 30 points at 1621453405.000000

I used to be deep into the Magic scene until a decade ago and upon first seeing this, I was immediately jumping on several different tangents from here. And then some more after seeking out the full thing. Ultimately, one stood out to me.

My hobbies have revolved around many kinds of different games all my life. Some less serious, some more so like physical sports and a couple of competitive video games. I don’t think what he’s talking about is entirely baseless, if you tone it down a lot and generalise. Without getting too much into it, I believe there are a many good lessons to be learned from participating in almost any competitive scene, and to a certain extent I’ll agree with Zvi in that the mindset you need to develop to reach the top in anything will serve you elsewhere.

What I’m setting up with this is, if I were to push this argument myself, Magic would be the fucking worst game to choose. At least outside Arena, which is a relatively new online thing, it’s stupidly expensive, its business model built on artificial scarcity and price obfuscation. The issue of card availability warps the way the whole community operates, forcing everyone to constantly think about buying, selling and trading. It spits in the face of the spirit of fair competition, with some competitors starting from a material disadvantage. It warps the incentives of the company managing the game away from making the game the best it could be.

There’s an incredible amount of rationalisation at play in spinning all this as a sensible thing to be a part of and to promote. I know, I lived it, and at each point in the previous paragraph I could have sidetracked into addressing counterarguments a Magic fan would give. Having been there, and later looking back at it with new perspective, it’s shocking what I ended up accepting as normal after having gradually got more and more invested.

The positive aspects he sees in the competitive Magic scene are something you could find from many other competitive games, without a ton of negative baggage unique to Magic.

At this point I forgot where I was previously going, because I looked at Zvi’s opening paragraphs again and now I just can’t get over how extremely rationalist they are, so I’ll just wrap up with some easy cheap sneers. Did you really “figure out on a gears-level” how this community you speak so highly of came to be? Did you apply “the art of clear and effective thinking” to consider whether there might be other communities like it? Or do you think something might “get overlooked” here?

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u/nodying 14 points at 1621458111.000000

> At this point I forgot where I was previously going, because I looked at Zvi's opening paragraphs again and now I just can't get over how extremely rationalist they are, so I'll just wrap up with some easy cheap sneers This is real rational enlightenment, knowing when to stop and just rag on some dumb words.

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u/JohnBierce 2 points at 1621759723.000000

This is the way.

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u/lofrothepirate 8 points at 1621468154.000000

> At least outside Arena, which is a relatively new online thing, it’s stupidly expensive, its business model built on artificial scarcity and price obfuscation. The issue of card availability warps the way the whole community operates, forcing everyone to constantly think about buying, selling and trading. I feel obliged to link Jesse Mason’s [Magical Capitalism](http://blog.killgold.fish/2018/04/magical-capitalism.html) for anyone looking for further analysis on this point.

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u/repe_sorsa 9 points at 1621490378.000000

I was indeed drawing heavily on Jesse's writing there. I find him fascinating in that I've experienced Magic through the lenses of two very different realities, and it's rare to see anyone seriously critiquing the game at the same length. Outside of the Magic community, you aren't going to spend a lot of words on explaining why it's ridiculous for a single deck to cost four digits, why competition should take place on an even playfield, or even why what makes the most money for Wizards isn't automatically the best for the game of Magic. Inside of it, few people will question any of that. Jesse is a rare voice who will start from the place of the players's shared assumptions, and work his way back out of that hole.

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u/DELETED 5 points at 1621584523.000000

> The very fact that so many people, whether competitive or casual, care so deeply about the appearance and the rarity of their cards does a lot to expose how irrelevant the game itself is to so many people. There’s nothing that a foil does for you in a game, and the most reaction it can cause is for someone to go “whoa, cool card.” Well this _would_ explain why, even as convenience rose substantially, I felt less invested in playing online magic. What a disturbing self-realization. 😅

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u/DELETED 6 points at 1621584594.000000

> Newer players comprise the third, lowest class in Magic. Rather than being cut a break and given some starting stuff for free like in modern free-to-play games, they’re punished for not even knowing how to buy cards. Their consumerism is, in some way, involuntary: sure, they choose to play Magic, but they don’t know that there are ways to acquire cards other than buying packs. They don’t know enough about Magic to know how to spend less money on Magic. It’s like a startup fee for learning the game, a tax on a lack of Magical knowledge. Oh my fucking god THANK YOU FOR FINALLY POINTING THIS SHIT OUT There's a reason my first online username, created for MTG forums, was "Budget Player Cadet". (Sorry if my reactions here are a bit emotional, but this is dredging up some _old_ fucking feelings and vindicating a lot of them.)

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u/carfniex 54 points at 1621432070.000000

having to believe that your nerdy hobbies are saving the world must be very difficult and tiring

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u/Remi_Autor 32 points at 1621433395.000000

Yeah but *getting* to believe your nerdy hobbies are saving the world must be so uplifting. Part of me envies them.

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u/snafuchs 10 points at 1621457993.000000

It just leads to the most tedious discussions where people who should know better don’t back down from their position because they consider it the most important thing… oh

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u/pusillanimouslist 5 points at 1621746964.000000

That belief burns both ways, because for every ounce of ego boost it provides it also gives you deep rage that other people just don’t get it.

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u/Thanlis 21 points at 1621437111.000000

Oh honey. TurboZvi was over 20 years ago; you can’t keep your ego fed on nostalgia forever.

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u/repe_sorsa 23 points at 1621443162.000000

I originally started typing out a very different post, but after going through a few Twitter responses and mulling things over a bit, I went from being shocked to find out it was Zvi who wrote this to it making perfect sense. In his prime, Zvi was a savant at analysing the game, but also still learning basic social skills. This picture might look familiar to people who've dealt with rationalists. *Of course* he thinks the social group he grew up with and had a high standing is the best thing in the world, and has limited enough perspective to go on and publicly assert this with confidence.

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u/dgerard 18 points at 1621456586.000000

just thinking of Zvi Mowshowitz, the rationalist M:tG pro who was at Metamed and is also afraid of Roko’s basilisk

edit: lol didn’t realise it was literally him writing this, because of course it was

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u/Thanlis 8 points at 1621468008.000000

I actually assumed it was a Zvi fanboy.

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u/DELETED 27 points at 1621433401.000000

[deleted]

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u/JabroniusHunk 27 points at 1621435521.000000

These guys are probably the grown-ass men who chase kids away from Friday Night Magic by being too rude and intense.

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u/DELETED 21 points at 1621438380.000000

BOY DOES THAT TRACK

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 12 points at 1621440274.000000

I kind of imagine it different, I think of it as the guys who groom the kids with excessive complements about how they’re gonna be president one day because they’re so good at a card game

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u/AnthraxEvangelist 19 points at 1621438285.000000

I have been playing Magic on-and-off since 1994 myself. Currently on, but in a very casual way. I have read this press release and the responses to it. I'm up-to-date enough to know that this writer is several years late to arrive at the controversy. Hasbro/WotC has been slowly dis-investing from using the Pro Tour as a means of advertisement. This is an unpopular announcement, but not unexpected. It has not really ever been feasible for a person to actually make a living doing nothing but playing in Magic tournaments. Sure, a few college kids with limited expenses probably managed to not need a job while fucking around for a few years, and quite a few more made a living as content creators (authors, podcasters, YouTubers), but that's not cashing prizes in tournaments. That said, Magic is the most incredibly-complex game I've ever seen. Winning the big tournaments that used to happen would mean twelve to fifteen rounds over two long days. It was an achievement.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 14 points at 1621440228.000000

Hey, doing anything difficult to do is an achievement! I’m just not into card games and I’m happy with that. My only gripe is extending that to imagine it generalises, and the only reason I have a gripe with it is when you’re ignorant enough of the wider world that you really think it counts as more than a *specific* cognitive skill.

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u/SailOfIgnorance 15 points at 1621434747.000000

>I can see how clear thinking about a complicated game makes you a clear thinker in at least a limited way, but what about that makes your talent for a fuckin’ card game translate into thinking about the world beyond the FUCKING WORLD OF A CARD GAME 100%, plus, it's not like all games were banned. The possibility of playing chess, or some other nerd card game like gwent, is somehow not available to him, and is likely a much more plausible transfer of his 'skills'.

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u/sephirothrr 7 points at 1621455679.000000

> So the most interesting part of this is the word “effective” - I can see how clear thinking about a complicated game makes you a clear thinker in at least a limited way, but what about that makes your talent for a fuckin’ card game translate into thinking about the world beyond the FUCKING WORLD OF A CARD GAME this is of course extremely anecdotal, and might be some sort of chicken/egg situation, but I credit mtg for helping me develop my skills as a programmer, as they both involve a lot of similar system-level analysis that said, i'm pretty sure i provide no useful value to the real world, so no way to say if that's good or not edit: > The only line from Larkin I will ever bother quoting in earnest it's trite, but i can't stop myself from loving this be the verse

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u/nodying 6 points at 1621447916.000000

> I just thought Necrons were cool, but getting further than that was a pain in the arse That disheartening feeling when the robot pyramid skeletons from outer space need exhaustive tinkering and tonnes of moolah so they can do any of the cool things you can imagine them doing. And it's not even cool by then, just work, because then you have to think about matchups and terrain and placement and moment-to-moment tactics and the arbitrary hand of Games Workshop tipping the scales by altering the invisible numbers that don't matter but that everything counts for any of it to mean anything. In hindsight, that there's so many fashos in the wargaming scene is kind of inevitable. It's a powerful lure for unreflective people who think having money and time to burn makes them superior humans.

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u/wallofsneer 11 points at 1621441674.000000

Funny thing is, gwern et al. are always going on about how any kind of mind-training is useless, won't transfer to other skills, won't increase your IQ and you're basically stuck for life with whatever your "genes" gave you. Maybe it's a kind of cargo-cult: people with high IQ tend to gravitate around MtG, so if I play MtG I have to be high-IQ. Not exactly rational but very predictable if you assume that IQ is meaningful and determines your social worth.

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u/nodying 25 points at 1621446887.000000

> people with high IQ tend to gravitate around MtG, so if I play MtG I have to be high-IQ As Blue/Green pond-scum, I can attest to this. It takes a very high IQ to put counterspell cards on a table. Plebs could never, their cards would go on the floor, into space, it would be chaos.

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u/JohnBierce 4 points at 1621760225.000000

I once played a deck with 34 assorted counterspells (in Standard). It was the most majestically stupid deck I have ever played. Literally zero thought. Just counter everything, attack with my dinky little utility creatures. Counter, counter, counter, counter. Never has there been an easier-to-pilot deck. (RDW is actually one of the most intellectually challenging decks to play at higher levels, ironically. So many timing choices necessary every single turn, and a single screw-up can cost you a match.) I kind of miss Magic sometimes, and then I remember I like being able to afford things and having real human conversational topics.

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u/clawsoon 21 points at 1621464071.000000

> Funny thing is, gwern et al. are always going on about how any kind of mind-training is useless, won't transfer to other skills, won't increase your IQ and you're basically stuck for life with whatever your "genes" gave you. Maybe it's a kind of cargo-cult: people with high IQ tend to gravitate around MtG, so if I play MtG I have to be high-IQ. This reminds me of the anxiety of peak Calvinism. God has already decided whether you're going to heaven or not and there's nothing you can do about it, so you desperately look for signs to confirm that you are among the Elect.

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u/lofrothepirate 13 points at 1621467851.000000

Every Rationalist mask hides a Calvinist’s face.

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u/eaton 8 points at 1621477556.000000

A lot of the post-calvinist weird shit also has that familiar "I have found my premise, and I will carefully extrapolate it to the moon; if it conflicts with reality, then reality is broken" vibe.

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u/Shitgenstein 13 points at 1621436616.000000

I played competitive chess, e.g. going to local tournaments, and being more aggressive than actually good, for a hot minute in my teens and the pretension around that game is far more culturally ensconced but still weird and kind of sad. I did have a red and black *MtG* deck but rarely played, though. Taking games super seriously is the fucking worst. At this point in my life, as an adult with a job and responsibilities, I don't have the spare time and energy to be highly competitive over games. Fucking around and having a laugh > winning.

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u/DELETED 15 points at 1621438653.000000

You can be really into a hobby without being an asshole about it. Gaming is no exception.

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u/blakestaceyprime 13 points at 1621451692.000000

We had a "chess club" in high school, because one guy in our friend group was genuinely really good --- played in tournaments, Elo rating over 2000 --- and everyone else just liked spending afternoons at the cheapest pizza place on our side of town and playing [bughouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess). The "chess club" overlapped strongly with the "academic team", which was in large part an excuse to get off campus during school hours. The more we won, [the less school we had to go to](https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=2945).

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u/giziti 6 points at 1621480676.000000

Bughouse and skipping school rocks

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u/nodying 4 points at 1621458664.000000

That is a danged good story, I loved the very teen sports movie part where the underdog team figures out the winning strat after a shaky start.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 6 points at 1621440313.000000

I always play chess to lose, it infuriates some people, and makes everyone else laugh: far more important

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u/nachof 9 points at 1621464257.000000

My only contact with competitive MtG players was the local FNM. It was the worst bunch of people I’ve had the misfortune of sharing a space with.

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u/MusicalColin 7 points at 1621471629.000000

Holy shit these twitter threads are dumb af. It’s very interesting to see how some people think that being skilled at a game translates to being skilled in general. I noticed some of this in the poker world. Poker players being like: well I’m good at thinking about probabilities in a deck of cards, I must be good at analyzing e.g. viral transmission or election results.

I’m kind of conflicted though. On the on hand, I do think that learning how to reason is a useful skill and I also think that strategy games are good at teaching certain kinds of reasoning. On the other hand, I doubt those skills generalize without a lot of work. Which is to say that they don’t just generalize.

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u/DELETED 7 points at 1621583632.000000

> On the other hand, I doubt those skills generalize without a lot of work. They _really_ don't. The skills involved in MTG are highly specific, and while you can use it to learn strategy, the strategy is so deep, specific, and complex that it's actually a lot _harder_ to transfer out than, say, success in Chess or Poker... Things which are _already_ hard to transfer out.

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