A more helpful way to think about "signaling"

Robin Hanson is a seminal figure in my corner of the internet. One of the things he talks a lot about is "signaling," an explanation for people's behavior that says they are not doing X because of X's obvious benefits (or the benefits they would say they're going for), but instead because X demonstrates an advantageous social property or attitude.

E.g., "medicine isn't about health" means "when people make healthcare decisions, it's easier to explain their behavior by assuming that they are trying to demonstrate that they are reliable allies instead of trying to make people healthier." Same with "politics isn't about policy," "art isn't about insight," "charity isn't about helping," etc. (See more here, here, and here.) Even nastier, Robin thinks our brains hide these real motives from ourselves, because it's more advantageous to really believe you are doing charity to help people, instead of strategically demonstrating alliance.

E.g. a peacock with a brain more like a human's might say they just like having plumage because it's beautiful, but Hanson would say they're "really" judging that plumage is expensive, and they want to show that they're healthy enough to waste energy on it. They just don't know that's their "real reason"!

Sorry peacock, you should have stuck with a peacock brain -- it's a simpler life.

If we set aside the question of whether these theories are well-supported and assume that there's at least a little truth to them, they could be helpful for thinking through decisions to get more of what we endorse wanting -- if you can notice when one healthcare decision is better for demonstrating caring while another is more effective, or when one kind of art is better (for you) for insight / enjoyment while another is trendier, you can make more informed choices.

But I don't find it very helpful to get in a mindset of "I'm doing a bunch of stuff for hidden, embarrassing, sometimes hypocritical reasons" -- that's a nasty thing to believe about yourself, and in people who are maybe a little too obsessed with perfect behavior, I think it's more likely to lead to fretting or defensiveness than better decisions.

Here's a better way (for me) that seems just as true as the Nasty View:

1. Assume that the feelings are real
2. Note that there could be other forces influencing the feelings
3. Check whether you want to rebalance your decision
4. Check whether there are prosocial ways to channel those forces -- plumage actually is beautiful

E.g.:

1. "This art speaks to me! It's fun, and I want to share it with people!"
2. "Sometimes people get this kind of feeling because some part of their brain is keeping track of what might look cool to other people -- e.g. this art is sophisticated, and enjoying it would show that I'm sophisticated."
3. "Does knowing this change how I feel about the art? Not in this case, I still like it!"
4. "I feel great about a world where everyone 'shows off their plumage' -- sure, be careful not to play status games with your art taste, but let's celebrate the beautiful weird extreme things, and give other people the chance to see if they would like it too."

And that's why I feel 100% good about sharing this song, while incidentally demonstrating that I'm a Sophisticated Person who likes Slightly Complicated Things:

Merry Christmas!

A simple 3d world in ~200 lines

Controls: click and drag to look around, and click on a location to move to it!

The main technique here is ray-marching signed distance fields, as pioneered / popularized by the incredible Inigo Quilez.

Helpers help most in photo finishes

Caveat up front: I'm focused here on marginal value of donations / helping out, and ignoring many important political effects like "everyone joins together to create a big change."

Last year, K and I donated a lot more than usual to political campaigns. A lot of it was focused on trying to help the Democrats take the US Congress. I had pretty high hopes, going off predictions like 538's.

When the first set of results came in, Democrats had done worse in Congress than I had hoped. This made me wonder: had I misunderstood the situation, and donated to something that was actually pretty unlikely to work? The models hadn't predicted the presidential election being as close as it was either, which didn't help. I felt a little burned, like maybe I'd overvalued donating -- it was still an honorable thing to do, but looking kind of bad from the "help people with $" perspective.

After Democrats took the Georgia runoffs and won control of Congress, I felt waaaay better -- we won! Donating was an incredible idea!

...

Uhhh, flipping back and forth like this can't be right -- what's going on here?

This situation almost seems artificially set up to illustrate this lesson, which I think is basically right:

If you're contributing a little to a win-or-lose group outcome X, your help was most valuable when X is either just barely achieved, or just barely not achieved.

How helpful you were is independent of whether X is achieved or not -- it all comes down to how close the call was. 

In other words: if the Democrats are set up to win by a lot, helping them win by a little more isn't very valuable. Likewise if they are set up to lose by a lot, and you help them lose by a little less -- not very valuable. But when it's really close, it means your contribution has a better chance of pushing them over the finish line.

Right after those first Congressional results came out, when I thought I had been overoptimistic and Democrats would probably lose Congress, I drew exactly the wrong lesson! I should have said "wow, my help was even more valuable than I thought -- look how close it was! Thank goodness I donated."

Democrats "losing" the first round of the Congressional election is weak-to-moderate evidence that the models I was using were too optimistic about their chances, and I should take that into account in future predictions. But counterintuitively, my models being too optimistic means I undervalued political donations, if anything. (An easier case to illustrate this principle: if your model of plane crashes is too optimistic, you will undervalue efforts to prevent them.)

...

Lessons:

1. *All else equal,* you maximize efficiency by aiming for your "marginal contributions to group outcomes" portfolio to have a 50% win rate -- if you're always contributing to things that (win / lose), you should swap them for things that are (less likely / more likely) to succeed in order to make a bigger difference with the same amount of marginal help. 
2. Be careful when reflecting on whether things were worthwhile -- there's some counterintuitive interplay between having been overly optimistic / pessimistic, and overvaluing / undervaluing marginal contributions.

Quick and dirty: political donations as retirement savings?

(Warning: not really checked, I hope not insanely wrong. Let me know if you spot a mistake.)

You want to have a nice retirement, right? You're hoping to end up with a bunch of money in a retirement account, so you can use it to pay rent, do things you enjoy, maybe travel a bit.

You're also thinking about your long-term health -- if your body is in OK shape when you retire, it'll be more pleasant to live in, and last longer.

Well, outside your body and your house, how about your city, state, country, or planet? It seems like one of the political parties isn't interested in preserving functional democratic governance or the environment. Maybe some of your "retirement savings" should be in the form of political donations, to the party that seems to want to take care of the place you'll be living?

You've heard about big businesses and really really wealthy people making political donations to try to advantage themselves. Maybe this is your chance to get in on the action and make some self-interested political donations to set yourself up for the future, instead of donating because it'll help other people?

---

I thought this was an interesting argument, but some quick-and-dirty calculations make me think it probably doesn't work out -- I highly doubt that political donations are competitive with normal retirement savings. (This doesn't say anything about how good they are at helping other people.)

Spoiler alert: the whole thing is driven by the tiny likelihood that your political contribution makes a difference to political outcomes.

I probably screwed something up in here -- let me know if you spot an error!

Value of saving: If you save $X today, how much is it worth at retirement age (67)? Let's assume around 6% returns in your retirement portfolio -- I think that's already adjusted downward for inflation, but I didn't check very carefully. (I'm ignoring 401(k) matching, tax stuff, and the idea that you might have maximized contributions already, and assuming you can find 6% return somehow.)

The math works out to $X * (1 + interest)^years -- basically, if you know the interest rate and how old you are, you know how much your money will multiply by retirement. Here's a table with some multipliers:

Current age	Years till retire	4%	5%	6%	7%	8%
24	43	5.4	8.1	12.3	18.3	27.4
28	39	4.6	6.7	9.7	14.0	20.1
32	35	3.9	5.5	7.7	10.7	14.8
36	31	3.4	4.5	6.1	8.1	10.9

So for example, assuming 6%, if you save $100 at age 24, you get ~$1,200 at 67. If you save the same amount at 32, you get $770 at 67. Compound interest is crazy! For the rest of this, I'm going to assume about a 7.7x multiplier (~35 years, ~6%).

Say I'm retired from 67 to 97. If I save $100 now, I'll get paid out $770 / 30 years ~= $25 / year.

So, if I save $100 now, that's worth $25/year, every year of my retirement. Pretty nice!

But that means that to be competitive, a political contribution of $100 needs to get me an expected $25 / year value for my whole retirement in order to be competitive with retirement savings. Uh oh...

Cost and value of easy political contributions: US voter turnout is low -- it's only ~50%. So, citation needed, I think the best "shovel-ready" political contribution (that doesn't require you to learn a bunch about the issues) is probably "cause someone to vote who otherwise wouldn't have." Conveniently, the party that wants good things to happen is helped by more voter turnout.

And causing someone to vote when they otherwise wouldn't have prooooobably costs $100 (that link says more like $40, but I expect more investigation to make that cost go up, not down).

So, turning out one vote needs to buy me an expected $25 / year of value during my retirement. Hm. Just to get a feel for this, let's assume you're buying an extremely powerful New Hampshire presidential vote with 1 in a million chance of deciding the president.

For voter turnout to be a good selfish retirement investment, this presidential election going well needs to be worth $25 million per year to me during retirement -- equivalent to a $750M balance at age 67! Did I screw something up in my calculations? If not, it basically makes sense when the election outcome could literally kill me / save my life, but not otherwise.

Let's imagine a more optimistic case: suppose that in a more local-level election, it costs $10 to turn out a vote, votes have a 1/1000 chance of deciding the election. These numbers look absurd to me, but that still means that this one local election going one way or another has to be worth $2500 / year to me during retirement. That's an extremely consequential local election. The presidential case looks more likely to work out -- they have nukes, and apparently we sometimes elect a crazy one.

So this calculation might possibly work out now -- I think it doesn't, but it might -- but it looks really unlikely to work out during a more normal election. You need a huge edge -- like a lot of insider knowledge about some issue or candidate, or an extremely consequential election. Or maybe there's something way better than vote-turnout, and I'm not finding it.

What about when you're older? Recall from before: $X, 35 years, 6% => $X*0.25 per year during retirement. When you're older, that 0.25 will go down, because there's less time for compound interest. How fast does that multiplier drop off?

Age	Multiplier
0	1.65
12	0.82
24	0.41
36	0.20
48	0.10
59	0.05
66	0.04

It drops off slower and slower as you age. Look at that great multiplier for a 0-year-old -- this is a great case for baby bonds!

So at e.g. age 50, I would be getting $10 / year retirement for my $100 investment. I don't think this ever drops off hard enough to make political donations a competitive retirement vehicle.

Some interesting things that came up along the way

• Who knows if "retirement" looks like this in 30 years? Why do people treat this as such stable advice, when "save for retirement" is such a new idea? E.g. 401(k)s didn't exist until the 1970s. Who knows what 2050 will look like?
• Votes now are more powerful than votes in the future will be, both because we can affect the future but they can't affect us, but also because there will be more voters in the future.
• How much is good governance worth to me, directly? Bad enough governance could kill me, but setting that aside, I think maybe it's worth between +$50k / year (guaranteed basic income, around the point of diminishing returns of happiness per dollar) and -$50k / year (by symmetry???). I think it'd be interesting to try to answer this question more rigorously, for more types of people. 

Writing and "persuasion"

How does persuasive writing work, when it actually works? Here's my new take on what a successful piece does:

Plant the seed: state a version of the idea that the reader might want to consider believing. This is just a declarative statement of the idea, not an argument for it. It can be wrapped in some excuse to state the idea declaratively, e.g. "Some authors advocating patent reform have proposed the use of prizes as an alternative to patents" (from here).

This is the most important thing; it says "hey, here's something you might want to consider believing." Even if you don't write any more, or (more likely) the reader doesn't read any more, there's a chance that the seed will take hold.

Describe the garden: take the reader on a tour through the worldview surrounding this seed -- the ecosystem of other ideas, arguments, and conclusions that orbit around this idea. If the idea is a good fit for the reader, they should find the garden appealing, and think it might be a good addition to their yard.

This is also a good time to explain how the idea is compatible or incompatible with existing ideas the reader may have. Be delicate with this; don't be fooled into thinking that you can respond to every possible argument, or compel the reader to accept the idea. But if you can anticipate reasons they might think they don't have room for this new idea, or it can't possibly grow in their soil, it's good to address them.

Give it time to grow: this is more of an attitude thing, but -- don't secretly hope that readers will finish the piece and immediately accept the idea. We're planting a seed here.

The underlying theory is that a piece of writing can't itself do the work required to reconcile a new idea with someone's current set of ideas. When a reader senses that the writer thinks they can force the issue, they push back, and defense always beats offense. What a piece of writing can do is plant a seed, and give the reader some reasons to consider nurturing that seed themselves; they'll construct their own arguments as needed, or come back to look for them.

Aside on arguments: what about the kind of people who are convinced by arguments? On the level of truth-finding, I think engagement with arguments tends to lead to much better results; if you're writing e.g. a research report for someone who's going to make some kind of decision, I would much rather see more aggressive use of arguments. For persuasive writing, though, my theory is that people who go for this sort of thing just have an unusual aesthetic for our gardens.

Fractally good, fractally bad

I've heard that humans are scope insensitive, and that seems right to me; how good and how bad things seem to me doesn't scale much with how many people are affected and how severely.

I think this is behind an odd and sort of beautiful effect I noticed today: the world seems both fractally good and fractally bad. As I zoom my frame of view to different sized things -- a moment, a song, a book, a person, a people, a pandemic -- each one gives me feelings of good or bad (or more complicated feelings) at similar strength, regardless of size. Zooming in and out and seeing similar valence at every level, and then realizing that this just keeps going, is a pretty cosmic-feeling experience.

Happy 2020!

7 thoughts on Keyforge

I bought KeyForge decks for several friends this Christmas, and played a couple games yesterday. If you like TCGs, I recommend spending $20 to buy two decks and trying it with a friend! Here are my other thoughts.

*** 1 ***

Let's just call it Keyforge, not KeyForge. Internal caps just... feel like they're going to make something feel dated later, and they're annoying to type :) Relatedly, "Æmber"? Really?? I need to be able to type and pronounce this word. I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "amber", because "I gain 3 amber" sounds a lot better than "I gain 3 ember".

*** 2 ***

Components needed to play: I just bought individual decks instead of the starter box set. This is a great feeling -- none of us have a big bulky box lying around, we each just have our decks! I can bring a deck to someone's house trivially, just in case someone wants to play! I was a little worried about not having the tokens in the box set, but found that during play, we used the following:

• 3 or 4 yellow dice to track Aember (usually you just need 1 per player)
• 2 purple dice to track Keys forged  (1 per player)
• A handful of blue dice to track damage on creatures
• A handful of other markers or dice to track stun on creatures and other misc effects

So, basically, I'd show up to the first few games with a medium-sized collection of dice and markers, and see what you use.

*** 3 ***

To me, Keyforge doesn't feel very similar to Magic, Hearthstone, and other Magic-like games -- it feels about as far from them in game-space as something like the Pokemon TCG (which I also recommend trying out if you like TCGs). In order, the things that I'm guessing make it feel not necessarily better or worse, but definitely different:

• No mana system: instead, you choose a House (think color) to play, then play / activate / discard as many cards from that House as you'd like. If you're sitting with a hand of cards and thinking "I have 3 mana this turn, next turn I'll have 4, what can I afford to play and what will I be playing later?", it's going to feel pretty similar to Magic / Hearthstone / etc. Removing mana changes the feeling of decisions (e.g. I'm not thinking about how to use mana efficiently), means that decks don't need to be composed with mana curves in mind, means that "must keep this card in my hand for later" is much less common, that you can often play many cards per turn, etc.
• Not "reduce opponent's health to 0": at first, I thought "collect Aember to win" would be really different. Then, I noticed that it's structurally similar: imagine that each Aember is 1 damage, and each Key is one "shield"; now you're doing 6 damage to break a shield, and have to break 3 shields to win. Not so different, right? However, collecting Aember still feels different to me. I think this is because a creature's combat power doesn't determine its Aember-gathering rate, because Keys are meaningful chunks that allow Aember gain / loss / stealing to be more dynamic while still ratcheting the game forward, and (most subtly) because the cards treat Aember more as a resource than as a damage-substitute.
• Not "draw a card each turn": instead, you draw back up to 6. I think this gives a very different game feel, and keeps card advantage from being a major consideration.

I really appreciate that Keyforge feels very un-Magic; I'm frankly kind of bored of games that feel like Magic, and am very happy to see more of the space of card games explored. (Another plug for Pokemon TCG if you enjoy thinking about game design -- I played it just because a friend liked it, and was like "holy wow, there are a ton of cool ideas here, why is this space so unexplored?!")

*** 4 ***

It feels like I'll play a lot more of unique-deck games (UDGs) than I historically have TCGs. The basic proposition is: "Pay $10. Now you have a deck that's all your own, it's at least playable and probably competitive with all your friends' decks, and you can play a game in ~20 minutes." In Magic or Pokemon, I personally have problems (emphasis on "personally", because obviously all of these things that I don't enjoy are super-fun to a huge group of people, and Magic / Pokemon are objectively great games):

• Constructed: "Buy a bunch of cards (for significantly more than $10) and build a deck. It's probably going to take a lot of time to figure out how to do this; in theory that's fun, but in reality, you don't enjoy it that much, and you're not great at buying cards or building decks. If you want your deck to be unique, expect to take a lot more time and some additional money. Now play against your friends, and hope that they built decks with similar philosophies, otherwise one of your decks is probably going to be much better than the other. If you want a new deck, it's at least $20 + time, worry, and effort. End up with a collection that makes you feel vaguely guilty for not using it."
• Limited: "Draft with friends. This takes all day, and you'll never play with the decks again. Also, you're not good at drafting; consider getting good at that, but realize that you don't actually care to get good enough to have a great time. Leave the cards with your friend, because they might actually use them."

(In reality, I've ended up playing mostly Wizard's Tower because that's the best version of Magic for me.)

Looking at these problems, maybe you can see why my main way of engaging with Magic is to read about it online and talk to friends about it; when I actually play Magic, the experience typically falls short of what I was hoping for. I'm hoping that UDGs like Keyforge will be more playable for me. 

(I would buy decks of a Pokemon UDG in a heartbeat -- I think it'd be an incredible improvement over the TCG on a ton of dimensions, and much better for young kids!)

*** 5 ***

On the other hand, I'm guessing that I won't spend nearly as much time reading, listening to podcasts, watching videos, etc. about Keyforge compared to Magic. Magic's deck-building core generates an incredible market of ideas; the difficulties that makes me dislike playing constructed Magic are food for the distributed Magic Brain that I love to watch and talk to!

*** 6 ***

I really enjoyed Richard Garfield's explanation of what he's hoping Keyforge will be. It's in the instruction manual, but I thought I'd include it at the end of this post. Perversely, it seems like Garfield kind of intends Keyforge to not have a Collective Brain on the level of Magic -- if there's no secondary market for cards, maybe it'll preserve a world where I don't see cards until they're played against me? I'm excited that Keyforge might be a purposefully obfuscated game; it can't be spoiler-proof, but it can remove the incentive for reading spoilers. (I'm personally not planning to go read spoilers of all the cards, and regret seeing some cards online.)

*** 7 ***

I'm hoping that homebrew formats take off, and it seems like there's a lot of potential for this -- e.g., take a pool of decks, mix them together, draft or construct decks, then sleeve up and fight. Each card's back identifies the deck that it's part of, so putting your decks together should be reasonably easy; the "default state" of a collection is a functional collection of standard decks, instead of a big mess of cards that could be made into decks or draft packs with a bunch of effort.

***

Conclusion: Keyforge is exciting! Maybe it'll be a fad like Pokemon Go, and maybe it'll have more lasting power. In any case, I'd recommend making the minimal investment to try it out.

***