subgenius wrote:Vollkan wrote:
b) Player X does genuinely believe A to be a scumtell.
b) is, on first glance, consistent with Player X being either town or scum. However, if Player X is town, this simply doesn't make sense - because Player X has a firsthand understanding of how it is that a townie could do A.
Here's the thing, though. There are very few, if any, scum tells that town don't engage either due to carelessness or poor play. If you really thought that scum tells are defined as actions that only scum do, then you'd only need to see one of them from a player to conclude that they are definitely scum. Scum tells are useful because we believe they are actions that are
more likely
to have been performed by scum, a hypocritical town player knows with certainty that his scummy actions were not the result of scum motivations, but he can't say that about any other player, and he shouldn't hesitate to point that scummy action out (although he should probably be prepared to explain his own scummy behavior afterwards).
On the technical definition of scumtell, that's correct.
At the risk of entering a thoery debate. On a theory level, "more likely" is neither the proper standard to apply in the game, nor is it the standard that the vast majority of people, in fact, apply. I'm hesitant to start a theory debate on this, because it gets into fairly abstract issues. But, basically, a) since almost everybody can see that almost nothing is scummy divorced of its circumstances (ie. it is terrible play to apply a blanket set of scumtells) and b) nobody has the empirical evidence needed to actually know what scum are "more likely" to do, we fall back on a behavioural/motivational approach. In short, we can't ask "What are scum more likely to do?" so we ask, instead, "Can I see this person reasonably doing X action as town?".
Maybe you disagree, but I'm not going to assume that Yura plays differently from the vast majority of people in this respect. That is, my assumption is that Yura is asking the latter question I identified above, not the former.
In which case, for Yura, somebody who not only is (by her own admission) useless, but has also come under fire for being useless, to vote another player on that basis makes no sense. If she is town, then her own uselessness should have caused a massive roadblock to her suspicion of bgg. On the contrary, however, we find that it does not. In fact, she mentions and entirely glosses over the evident contradiction.
