Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

poker and bluffing

Author:David McCusker
Posted:9/28/2000; 12:22:17 PM
Topic:poker and bluffing
Msg #:21822
Prev/Next:21821 / 21823

I like the lemonade you're fixing by revamping your discussion group policy to better handle the negativity. The oversight community idea is very interesting. Often this exists only in a very informal sense, but an actual formal group would be both useful and inventive for exploring online communities.

(But pick your committee carefully. A mole with an agenda besides oversight would be a catastrophe, since it would give them even more leverage than they could find in just talking.)

Phil Wolff suggested that you "lurk and pounce." This reminded me of the tactics I normally apply when policing a forum I hope to keep relatively free of excessive propaganda. That's why I'm writing this very short piece on poker and bluffing.

In another thread, I said my main rule was that I get to be unpredictable. This is because it is the most efficient way to defend against attacks. It forces an attacker to invest considerably more energy in an attack, since they cannot know for sure you will respond in any give case. (This is why it requires several people in concert for attacks to be most effective.)

You should ignore some attacks but not others, and it's best when it's hard for anyone to predict what you will do. And when you do respond to attacks, you should engage with varying degrees of intensity so this cannot be predicted either. But once in a while, hit very hard so it stings.

This is all a bit like poker in some sense, where it's very useful to bluff just enough to ruin another player's ability to predict your actions for sure. I remember reading a book about this once which said a bluffing frequency of about fifteen percent was within spitting distance of optimal.

If your behavior is nearly random one seventh of the time, this makes it very hard for someone else to finesse you into positions just because you can be predicted. If they know you act randomly with some frequency, then you must also change the frequency so this can't be predicted either. ;-)

Ideally you want to show a very broad range of behavior from very good to rather bad. You must establish that sometimes you will be a flesh eating ogre, just to show this is one possibility in any exchange. Of course this makes it hard to keep a perfectly clean nice guy record. (But so what? :-)

This behavior maximizes risk for an attacker. They can't know for sure you won't do something they would rather not experience. And at the same time, you might also ignore them and waste the time they invested. This equation cuts down on the amount of crap thrown in your direction to provoke fights.

When it's time to do something bad, just make sure it's justice and the other person has it coming. But don't trap them into being bad. Let them do it of their own accord. However, if you happen to accidentally look like an easy target for a kick in the rump, that's perfectly okay. They should know better.

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