I Helped Design the ‘Machine Learning President’ Game | Hacker News Reader

I Helped Design the ‘Machine Learning President’ Game

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83 pointsseverine12 comments

I'm reminded once more of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, although it's interesting to think about how this plays out when viral social media gets involved.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

Don't forget the Dunning-Kruger effect - sometimes the reader scoffs because they reversed cause and effect, or saw a correlation that doesn't exist ("vaccines cause autism!")

Additionally, quality on one subject by one author says little about overall quality. Maybe the author was forced to fill in for a sick subject matter expert, or rush re-writing the article after a hard drive failure, or just don't care because layoffs are coming... maybe the paper poorly interviewed their sports writer because sports is a filler for that paper. Maybe lots of things.

If you're trying to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia, you need to trends of quality not single data-points.

One wonders what sources Mayer (author of the New Yorker article) had, or thought she had.

The Gell-Mann Dunning Kruger Betteridge Godwin Effect.

Did I miss any?

Headline: "Did The Nazis Cause Hitler?"

That actually sounds like a really interesting game.

Is the game for members only?

We haven't published the rules so it's currently only available to be run by us...

That makes this almost completely uninteresting then.

Why not publish?

I've seen videos of large-scale games where - for example - you simulate WW1 with each major power represented by a team of 5 adults in separate rooms, with the game organisers running the underlying simulation, limiting each team's visibility of other teams and the simulation.

Perhaps this is such a game, where you can't play without 40 people for 2 days - and hence the rules aren't in enough demand to make publication practical?

From the article, it seems the game is an in-house product that the Scout team must conduct with trained facilitators and some special software. It doesn't sound like something you can download or sign in to play.

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