Kevin Simler

Optimal play for Villagers involves creating as much clarity as possible, as soon as possible, and being willing to assume that people who seem to be foolishly gumming up the works are Werewolves if there's no other clear target.

With optimal play, Villagers usually win, but in practice, at best one or two people try to create clarity and are picked off in the first round by the Werewolves, everyone else just tries to die last, so they lose.

The thing I said about elite culture favoring zero-sum games can be recast as: the social environment favors playing Werewolf over playing Villager.

We're trying to learn how to play the Villager strategy successfully. This has to involve figuring out how to do interpersonal fault analysis (identify when people are being Werewolfy) without scapegoating (assuming that fault -> blame -> exclusion).

In other words, justice seeks truth, but intends to leave no one behind; people who can't contribute need to feel safe admitting that, and people who hurt the group need the option to repent & heal the breach.

We don't have great finesse yet but optimal play in our world seems to be some fluid integration of talking about politics, healing personal trauma, and intersubjective openness. I'm working closely with @HiFromMichaelV and @jessi_cata right now.

But can point to other people doing parts of the thing, e.g. a few parts of Leverage Research seem to have aligned intuitions in some ways, @SamoBurja is doing a piece of this, and Michael thinks that @reasonisfun is doing an aligned thing.

Despite the length of this thread I was probably pretty telegraphic, so I strongly invite you to ask for explanation/evidence for ANY part of this that isn't obvious to you, and DM me if you want to switch to a higher-bandwidth channe..