Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

August 11th, 2025

edited 2025-08-11 · open in Roam
  • thinking about faith and got Claude to name examples of leaps of faith
    • historical examples of someone taking a leap of faith, with different outcomes. really emphasize the part where (A) they believed in something without enough evidence and (B) their conviction was part of the mechanism by which it was intended to work

      3 categories:
      - some of which paid out
      - some of which were just a total fuckup
      - some of which were a mess, hard to evaluate, good benefits but at great cost / side effects, etc
    • when you say yes to something, it makes a difference how much shared sense you have with the others involved of what you're saying yes to.
    • one implication of this is that if you invite someone to something and they skim the invite and say yes,
    • can you think of a fun game/social experiment one could play where each player is handed a piece of paper that is supposedly just to share with them their role in the game, but it actually describes a somewhat different game (some mix of "different framing" and straight up different rules!) and somehow in the course of the game the players find themselves in confusing conflicts about this, but (assuming reasonably friendly and metacognitively aware players) they're able to sort it out to some extent, but not like, fully sort it out before the game is over, like usually still some ambiguity.

      think about it from a few different angles, and consider analogies with other games with secret info and complex win-conditions, like one-night ultimate werewolf. the game itself could be one where actually everybody can win but some players are led to believe that their win-condition will NOT be one that other players will tolerate. or it could be one where not everybody can win, or where each player believes everybody is working towards a collaborative win condition when in fact no such condition exists. you might consider analogies to real-world situations, whether office politics, war, family dynamics, sports, [add more items to this list], etc,

      consider all the different possible combinations of these kinds of variations, and come up with a sketch or two for each one, then critique each of the ideas, then present me with your best ideas, in the form of a set of different player-cards that would go together. note that the player cards need to contain the entire ruleset, because the whole point is that we're giving people these cards to read in order to understand the game, not just to hand them their role. but you can make a note before you write out the cards, of which rules would be 100% in common between the roles.