Competing Wagons - Why?

[SpamWise]

What's the deal?

Also I was thinking today in economics if it's possible for ceteris paribus assumptions to apply to mafia, and if so how?

[jeep]

You need to give more of a question than that.

As to ceteris paraibus... of course it applies to any discussion where you want to limit the scope of what you are discussing, right? But I can't come up with a good example of when you would want to use this when discussing mafia. The best I can do at 1am is:

If you get more players on the site, ceteris paribus, there will be more mini-games played.

That's not really discussing mafia, though...
-JEEP

[Fuldu]

I think ceteris paribus can be applied to many WIFOM discussions, though more in the philosophic sense of the phrase than the economic one. If a cop has claimed then, all other things being equal, you'd expect the mafia to target them. WIFOM is one of the broader categories of reasons that things wouldn't be equal, but you could also consider basic issues like other roles (the cop is probably going to get doc protection), internal role issues (investigative immunity means the cop isn't a threat), strategic issues (the other mafia is a bigger threat right now than the cop), etc.

Now, all these are commonly discussed issues, so it isn't clear to me where using the phrase "ceteris paribus" adds anything to the discussion, but it certainly applies.

[PolarBoy]

SpamWise, if you really wanted to start a discussion on competing bandwagons, you could discuss a little bit more to get things started. For instance, you could start by describing the phenomenon you wish to discuss. At this point you could even cite specific examples so that those who have not witnessed it first-hand could go find out what you were talking about. You said "What's the deal?", which presumably means you don't understand the gameplay justification for something. You might go through some of the obvious explanations that you've already ruled out on your own, to save everyone else the trouble of pointing those out. If you just say "What's the deal?" it's quite likely that the discussion will go off on an unrelated tangent before you find out anything about what you originally intended to discuss.

Just thinking out loud.

[BrianMcQueso]

Ceteris paribus is a Latin phrase, literally translated as "with other things [being] the same," and usually rendered in English as "all other things being equal."

Because I had to look it up, I'm sure someone else had to, also.

[SpamWise]

My main question is

why

are competing wagons better for the town as opposed to singular wagons? It's a simple enough question I suppose, and I'm kind of expecting a simple answer.

Is there anything more apart from the voting patterns/reactions part?

I'm of the opinion ceteris paribus could be used when discussing night-actions in game. It would most likely be used in conjunction with circular reasoning. In the end it would just be a fancy phrase to chuck around probably. But still, I think there's a lot of players who like to build arguments up from given assumptions, and they could perhaps use ceteris paribus.

[Cadmium]

Well, I guess it's just that there are multiple people in the game and opinions/suspicions/motives differ. It would be kinda boring (not to mention impossible) having everyone agree every day, wouldn't it ? And suppose there always is a singular wagon, this would make it nearly impossible to locate scummy behaviour as well.

Still not sure if this answers your question though .

[Yosarian2]

My main question is

why

are competing wagons better for the town as opposed to singular wagons? It's a simple enough question I suppose, and I'm kind of expecting a simple answer.

Is there anything more apart from the voting patterns/reactions part?

Well, yeh, that's the primary reason. It's a good reason too; if there's only one bandwagon, then people either join it or they don't, neither one of which gives the town much info about them. On the other hand, if there's two wagons (and especally if one of them later on does turn out to be scum) it gives the town much more information, based on who was pushing what wagon, when, and how.

[PolarBoy]

I'm stretching to imagine a situation where I'd ask myself whether 1 bandwagon would be better than 2 or vice versa. I'm more likely to compare the suspiciousness of players and the effect my vote is likely to have on the other players. I suppose the reasoning that would lead to such a conclusion would be something like this: "Player X and player Y are equally suspicious to me. Player X has 3 votes, player Y has 1 vote. Because of Z, it would be better to have 2 wagons instead of one (one wagon instead of two). Therefore I will place my vote on Y (X)." In this case I think I would probably vote X, because a vote for Y would just help split things. However this is highly dependent on where we are in the game. I'd be much more likely to think this way on day 1, since I'm more likely to see two people as equally suspicious. On the other hand I'd also want to look at why X and Y were being voted in the first place.

The thing is that most of the time this isn't even a question. Usually there's so enough disagreement to generate two bandwagons that nobody has any cause to check whether it would be better to have 1 or 2.

[kuribo]

[Titus]

OK, back up for non econ majors. What is ceteris paribus?

And totally agree with point 7 by Yosarian.

If I gotta flip in the dark, always flip the counter wagon.