The One Your Friends Ban

They are so spicy, right? I went red so I could add in Manabarbs and Vortex, since lifegain was so meta in my group at the time.

It's what I like about the game, you can run the same basical strategy in several colors which causes variations.
Same same, but different.
The game is such a nice platform to study evolution.

I've stolen many tricks from nature during my own evolution projects.

When it was discovered that male sperm in many organisms mutated more when the male gets older.
That means the first array of children are similar to the father, but nature is gambling with the later generations. I simply had to add that concept to my own.

Later I added "stress" as driver.
If the deck won a battle, it's spawn would gain a number of mutations based on how many life points it won with. No loss of life would give the deck a 100% cloned child. If the deck had lost lots of life it's child would gain a lot of random mutations. That way, a successful deck would spread exponentially, until something started to hurt it and it would start to mutate. Once a population like this grew large enough to encounter versions of itself, it would usually start branching out in variations. It's the giraffes bottleneck again, the successfull species is it's own primary competitor.

We will be subject to this ourselves. The more widespread we become, the more nature will adapt us against our selves. But human ethics treat us all as the same, so I wonder how far this will go on before we declare someone inhuman. It's likely what happened with all the past humanoids, at some point we just went to war and gave up on differences. It's probably the reason why racism is still around, millions of years after.

I had a big debate with a group of friends recently about the legal ramifications of human virtual consciousness and does having a romantic relationship with an AI count as cheating, even after you have been "uploaded" yourself? It reminded me of a lesson where I was teaching evolutionary fitness and a student asked what my fitness was. Since I had not yet reproduced my fitness was near zero, making me a failure in the eyes of life. The few humans who sought that kind of "success" are viewed historically as monsters, and probably rightfully so. I had to explain to the class that while humans are animals, we are often an exception when it comes to anything behavioral. Evolution has long been holding the reigns of life, but humans choices have deviated too far from the basic rules that govern how life changes over time for us to really be considered within the same category as other life, so far as it relates to evolution. I believe experiments like your deck-building evolver are more important than ever. We need to understand these kind of complex systems before we start messing with them on the scale that humans are beginning to be capable of.

I wonder if machine learning could be applied by having an AI study all the decks posed online to develop some sort of algorithm and what kind of decks this AI would then start making itself?

That was often the outcome, yeah. The goal was more to showcase the (often overlooked by kids) deck-building consideration of your opponent's enjoyment. MTG isn't the Olympics; it's a game. We don't approach the table to completely dominate, we both want to have fun and maybe learn something. I like to think they were also able to apply this mindset to talking to each other, but I am not too sure about that.

There are some decks that technically stop it from becoming a game, and also the Olympics are technically a game, but yeah I see what you mean. Also the wanderer could prevent the damage dealt to you from all of the spells that deal damage to each player.

Yeah, in general I find land destruction to be kind of game breaking.

I do not have much experience with Planeswalkers. Would Pyrohemia not hit them since they are not creatures?

Since I've been a programmer too and one with radical thoughts, I've always believed in AI.
At the time when people were trying to break manacurves I actually went head to head against a new generation of programmers and defeated their algorithms time after time. I was so good at it that someone hacked into my account to change the numbers that I wrote during contest. (At that time I printed out everything I wrote and put in in archives at my home, so I could see what had been altered)

I had plenty of theories on how to build the way the AI could work, and I still have some.
I even cracked how to create colored manacurves (most curves back then was just monocolored for the ease) and still remember how I would set it up.

I also had plenty of plans on how to set things up so the simulator would be able to start playing blindly and then become better after millions of generations. I even wanted to give it an attention span so it would try to end infinite loops if it got into one.

If you have any background with programming I could take you through some of it.


Regarding competitiveness.
Since I've got a friend who is at champion I can tell that the training towards a tournament can be really intense.
I've usually had to proxy every deck in the format he wanted to take on, and then we would simulate tournaments based on the statistical rates until we identified the bad matchups, and then we would focus on them until his brew beat them well enough, and we'd start over with the tournaments.

This guy is in it to win, because he knows he can win. He's good enough to know that the training we go through is basically a confidence boost and a way to cover any surprises that might become suddenly popular.

The training is mentally at Olympics level, and he also covers the diet making sure his brain doesn't go cold.

He prepares his body too, because after all, the brain is sort of stuck in a body with chemicals that flow between the body and the brain. When one unit doesn't work well, the other follows it into ruin, so he trains intensely before tournaments to be in shape, and he does it with the same intent of winning.

So it's more like this, magic is an Olympic event where anyone can participate for a small fee, but it's still those with an extreme winning mentality that gets to the high tables.

I don't intend to demean competitive players at all; I can respect anyone with the discipline to train, whatever it is they have chosen to excel at. I don't expect tournament players to care one bit about their opponent's enjoyment, but in casual play I believe it is crucial. My perspective is coming from middle school kids who began to use their expensive and competitive decks (which they had copied from tournament players) to beat down and even bully other players who built their own $5 deck into thinking they were "bad at Magic". I designed this deck to prove a point. When it comes to a game played for fun, while winning is fun (and you should try to win) winning at the cost of your opponents' enjoyment is self-defeating, because you may never have anyone to play with again.

Human societies are built upon social hierarchy where status opens the gates for you while being nothing opens no gates at all.

In magic, if you lose enough games in a tournament you end up in the loser bracket, and most pro players just drop out rather than hanging out with "lesser players" they then either go home or hang out near the winners to study from what happens there.

I don't mind hanging out in the lower bracket myself because I like to teach magic to those with less skills.
The majority of players in the loser bracket have been spoon feed with the concept that winning isn't everything.
Anyone in the loser bracket can pack up and go back to their ordinary lives.

You can't do that in real life.

If you do not fight for a higher status, you will be in lifes loser bracket, and theres no way out of that except climbing the ladder or kill yourself. It's a harsh truth, and I do understand the need to mother and comfort those on the bottom by saying that winning doesn't matters, but what you do then, is strangling their initiative to strive towards greatness and become someone out of the ordinary.

I am not a fan of participation awards or arranging things so there is no loser. It's good to be competitive, but one lesson it has taken most of my life to learn is that it has its place and its limits. You don't want to be the one giving free money to little Billy because he landed on a motel in Monopoly; it ruins the game and teaches him a potentially damaging lesson. Neither do you want to be that adult that roflstomps all the little kids at Jenga and calls them losers.

There's a desirability spectrum here and the perspectives on this game we are discussing and motivations for playing it are coming from opposite ends of this spectrum. One one side we have uncompromising and relentless pursuit of the win at the cost of all else, which is something we admire in things like tournaments, the Olympics, and war. On the other end of the scale there are board games played with emotionally traumatized kids in an after-school program (some victims of abuse and/or in foster care) where winning is still the surface-level agreed upon objective, but the real mission is to learn how to have a positive interaction with another human. We might tolerate rage-quitting, BMing, smack talk, personal attack mind games and the like on the competitive end of the spectrum and brush it off as an expected side-effect of champions hyped up for the win, but on the side of the spectrum I play those behaviors are dangerous and damaging to our true objective.

We desperately need competitiveness in our society, but we also need honor, mercy, compassion, respect, patience, and grace.

As long as you teach both sides of the coin, lessons will be learned :)

I am of the oppinion that humans are extremely good at creating mental structures.
We give these structures many names (laws, ethics, morals, rules, philosophies, isms and so on)
An extreme majority of these structures are in fact mental prisons designed by others to enslave everyone else.

The six words that you choose to state that we need, are great examples of this, because exactly why do we need them ? Why not status, fashion and religion or just "rules" these three also makes humanity "great".

I mean, as a teacher you've probably been taught exactly what concepts that young minds need.
Let's take positive thinking (also a mental prison, although one I like because science says it's good for our mental health) surely you've been taught that not teaching them positive thinking, their lives will quickly fall appart ?
But do you ever question what you are being taught to teach ?

Teaching pupils a darker view on society will get you fired very fast, so hands down, are you sure you are not imprisoned too by established mental slavery ?

I know it may sound paranoid, but I'm pretty versed in this topic and truly believe humanity is undermining itself because an exclusive elite often uses all the mental trickery to enslave us.

This is the basis of all human evil, all suffering arises from rules imposed on us all.

Sure we are taught that a world without morals will be a living hell, but exactly how did we get the scientific proofs that that would truly be the state of things. Think about nature, animals are supposed to be without morals, but somehow it keeps on forming symbiosis between species.

Evil can easily take the appearance of good. In the case of symbiosis, animals do not work together or cooperate out of moral goodwill, but out of self-preservation. They have chosen an arrangement that is the most beneficial to them of all arrangements they have found. It is our mistake to apply human morality to it when it has no place there. Animals do not live "without morals" as you put it; morality itself is a human construct that has no meaning applied to other organisms.

I would have to disagree with you about "the six words". I did not chose those words because I have been told to. Those are the traits I have chosen to live by myself because I believe in their power, at a personal level, not mid-control mental slavery level. Those are the traits of people I desire to be around, that I want in my life. You must not have much experience with the U.S. public school system if you think we, as in institution, are teaching mercy, compassion, grace, or honor on any large scale.

I would definitely disagree that status, fashion, and religion make humanity great. Religion has been, and will always continue to be, something that people have misused for power. For many people religion probably does function as a mental prison of sorts. What I know is this: I have lived my life in two phases. In the first I lived for myself. I did what I wanted; I did whatever I thought would make me happy. That phase ended in depression, addiction, and debt. So I tried the opposite way as an experiment. I lived for others, volunteering my whole life for a year without a concern for my future, health, or wellbeing. At the end of that time I knew happiness like I would never have believed possible and found meaning and purpose that filled all the empty places inside. I don't care what society thinks about "the six words" because I know firsthand their power, and it is a power that can break all mental slavery.

......wait a second
You sly dog! You got me monologuing!
tap 4 red, activate Pyrohemia x4

Incredible life story :)
Mine's been the exact opposite.
I started out a happy and sharing person which meant that at a late age I have nothing, is being screwed by thieves hustlers and social welfare (and practically every women friendzoned because I was so supportive)

I'm scrambling not to lose my economy again, has a truly strange paranoid life to avoid being hustled anymore, and the police won't help me against someone with keys to my apartment because "there's no sign of a break in"

The mental trap of "you are monologuing" is a pretty modern invention. A book is a monologue, a speaker usually monologues, but people in general don't monologue in my oppinion, but anyone wanting to "win" an argument can accuse the other of monologuing.

There is a truly wast number of conversational weaponry, and most of it is based on telling an old story creating a narrative where people will easily drop into roles.

Take for example "the hitler meme"
According to the internet the first person to mention hitler or holocaust in a conversation usually loses their argument.
We got thousands of that kind of micro-rules.

I am really sorry to hear that. It probably rings a bit hollow across the void of the internet and since I barely know you, but I mean it anyways.

I have noticed it becoming increasingly difficult to have a conversation, especially political, with someone and feel like I am talking to a real person with actual views, views they have thought about and understand. So often they just repeat the nonsense they have read on Twitter or Facebook; more of an ideology wearing a human skin than a person who agrees with an ideology, if that makes any sense.

In education we are completely trapped in the logical fallacy of argumentum novitatem; you might call this a mental prison. We desperately seek new and shiny solutions to problems we could solve with what we have now if we just stuck with it long enough.

Also, per your example: since you brought it up, does that mean I "win"? :)

I've more or less adopted the "suffer to grow" mentality these days. I used to be more zen.
Once you accept that life is all about these mental structures, you can start to use them as if they were dresses, so I'm much more hardened than I used to be.

I think the reason why people feels more like automaton to you these days are probably because you've lived long enough that you've sort of heard all the narratives already, and can chain them into categories. That sort of allows you to see "through" the framework.

They on the other hand have had less time with these structures, so they are sort of testing them out to see if they can win something by adapting those ideas and opinions.

That's why I view almost all concepts as mental prisons build by others.

We've been at it for so long that the layers of all these constructs are burying us.

I sort of realized how it all worked when I was thinking very hard upon how dominance and submission were tied together, it's the story of sadomasochism being woven into our worldviews. A tale about how some are meant to lead, and others to follow. Some have great endurance, while others have the willingness to bring pain.
Once you start to look closer at all the connections, pleasure and pain, snuffporn, jackass, love and the storfull relationships, it is basically all stories spun around the same theme. "No pain, no gain" "if it doesn't hurt, how do you know you are alive" "without evil there can be no good" all of that is a gigantic web of small stories with a similar framework. "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again" "winning is not as important as participating" "you must break them down to build them up"

From there the whole human race became a prisoner in my mind. All through our lives we are told stories, and our identity is more or less based on what act we think we've been cast in. I had quite the depression from starting to see the world like this.

The funny thing is that sociopaths are sort of a rescuing rope in all of this.
They are known to be without morals, and usually doesn't cast themselves in any of all the available roles.
It's possible to live a life outside of this framework, but you quickly discover that there is a large number of humans who reinforce the mental webs, because they themselves have realised the power of telling a story to manipulate others. It's probably why the :Nigerian prince scam" is still in use.

And the hitler meme!
I'm not sure if outlining the rules counts as an auto loss :)

I just hope I haven't broken your reality...

By the way, if you search for the decktag: wdm 2018
And click on the deck titled "deckbuilding and storytelling" you might be able to see how my worldview can be applied to magic as a game. Maybe you can teach the class how we all superimpose a common narrative on the formats we play.
This is probably also why so many people try out several formats or even create their own.

What classes do you teach ?

I kinda like your perspective on "automatons" as you called them. We all have to try on new concepts when we first confront them, but eventually we are able to sort them, adapt them, and re-combine them. I read the deck and it did remind me of this; a person confronting a new sociological structure isn't that different from a player confronted with someone challenging the meta with their plays.

I guess my tendency is to approach what you would call mental prisons and I would call concepts from a more positive side, although I acknowledge the dark side exists. Sociological constructs, human communication, programming, science, relationships all lean heavily on shared concepts, like your stories, and knowledge of that shared idea and the ability to assimilate it grants increased intellectual access.

Take for instance the scientific concept of the ecological balance between photosynthesis and cellular respiration, sometimes called the carbon cycle. Imagine two people, one who possesses knowledge of this concept and the other who does not, are having a conversation about climate change. It's like speaking a word in a foreign language, which needs to be translated before comprehension can occur. It is something the field of semiotics deals with, a hobby of mine since my days in college, in particular biosemiotics (I studied plant/insect interactions, but that is a tale for another day). We must be able to translate our personal thoughts into signs (the semiotics term) and those signs must be translatable back into someone else's thoughts. If we could download the original thought directly into the mind of the second person it would be unintelligible to their mind, like the same code but written in Java instead of C++. They cannot really hope to proceed productively in this conversation until the missing concept has been assimilated by the person without it. We will have a much better chance at success trying to teach this to them if they have already assimilated the pre-concepts of plants, atmosphere, soil, basic chemistry, decomposers, basic astronomy, other cycles including the water cycle, etc.

We should probably all be able to have a conversation about climate change, so we decide that all students should learn the carbon cycle, as well as all the pre-concepts. Is it controlling and dominating of us to demand everyone learn this thing, with their having no say in the matter? Probably. But do we want people running around living ignorant of how the planet works and the impact of their lives on it? Probably not.

My point is that our mental prisons do not have to imprison us, they can actually free us to achieve something quite powerful, understanding and relating to a thought coming from another human's mind, despite having different perspectives and life experiences, different brain chemistries, and even, God forbid, coming from different political parties. This is a large part of why I became a teacher.

I teach middle school science and I freakin love it.

I get that at least some of the structures can be usefull in the hands of well meaning enlightened people.
The problem is that the world is filled with a majority of stupid selfish people.

A clever scientist may be able to create a brilliant structure, but for others to imitate and spread that structure it takes a lot of equally clever AND good people to adopt it.

The scenario that usually follows is that someone less smart understands parts of the structure and selfishly alters it to fit their needs.

So one brilliant structure becomes diluted and altered all the way down through a layer of humans, and suddenly we got thousands of mutated variants of structures competing in a darwinistic way. The easiest exploitable and easiest performance versions of the structures will win out, and the brilliant worldhealing structure is soon forgotten by the masses while the originator mourns the loss of such a Brilliant idea.

The us, army has actually field tested "downloading memories" with success.
Test persons have been been learning how to shoot carrying a chip in their head, and after an extensive course at the shooting fields. The chip was then given to test subjects who had never been at a shooting field. Compared with a test group they proceeded to start shooting with positive "improvement"
We haven't got anything near total recall, but I want you to know it's already being field tested, and they have probably moved a lot further since I learned that it was out there.

A technology that I place more hope in, is the "rationality field" which increases your rationality. It's also been talk about as a faith dampener, and the applications against terrorism is pretty clear :)

But all scientific gear can be turned against us by anyone selfish enough.

All mental structures can be distorted and take on their own life, and suddenly we become ruled by some mutated ism or politic that was well meaning to begin with, but there were noone to stop it from turning bad, because all the way down it seemed like such a nice thought.

When I get into a discussion with someone religious they often have something on the government, so I usually ask if they believe in the phrase:
"Power corrupts, ultimate power corrupts ultimately"
And they pretty much always agree that it's a solid truth.

Then I point out that god is ultimately powerfull, and they will blink as the realisation sinks in.
Then they often separates god from corruption, "god is never corrupt" but pressing down on the phrase of ultimate power I change their view about the line, altering the narrative.

I then usually follow up by telling them that the phrase exists because corrupt people are attracted towards power, and it is usually them that makes it seem like power corrupts, but usually they were corrupted to start with and once in a position of power they showed their true self.

Now the people I often tell this accepts this new truth, but what happens to the knowledge and insight I've given away trying to make the world a better place ?

Since it hasn't caught on I'm assuming that most people aren't bright enough to say "wow, if only everyone knew that" I also assume that a bunch of them thinks "wow, what a gullible idiot, I can't believe he's trying to teach this to everyone. Now that I know it, maybe I can find a way to exploit it"

Here's a class experiment for you:
Tell the students that a big albino rat has been spotted on the school ground.
Anyone who can give out any information on where it's been seen lately will be helping in locating its nest and will be given a reward.

It's up to you what kind of reward it is, but it should be proportional to the number of sightings any individual can give you. Maybe a piece of candy for each sighting.

Make notes on who reports, and where they saw the rat.

Let the experiment run for a while, with the reward visually given each time.

You will suddenly see an increase in reports on the rat, and you will know the name of every student who is willing to lie to you.

Continue this long enough and I'm pretty sure you will start to see other humans as a lot more selfish than you think of them now.

I've been running small tests like these all my life because I'm an asperger and is insatiable curious about other people.

My own estimate is that about 1% of your students will not spot the albino rat.
10% if they like you.

Heh, after I mentioned the "Nigerian prince" scam the commercial algorithm have decided that I should be showed a commercial on how to send money to Nigeria :) I had quite a laugh about that :)