This is gonna be a really long, rambling post about gacha, gambling, addiction, psychology and ethics. If you want the TL;DR, here it is: Joey and Garnt are at the very least irresponsible influencers, and at the very worst they might have a serious addiction that stems from a low dopamine life-style.
We all most likely watched the episode and know what happened and what was talked by who, but for further context, if you are unaware of anything, even after the memes, on the last episode of Trash Taste Podcast, specifically in the last 40 minutes of it, the Boys discussed (and argued) about the gacha game scene and gambling addiction. You can check it out on the sticky post on the top of the subreddit front page.
To cut it short, Connor argued that gacha games are just as if not more dangerous than actual gambling, specifically for a few reasons. First, it is a game of no return. In real life gambling, you can (fleetingly) get real money back from it, and even make a considerable profit. Gacha games simulate the act of gambling while offering no significant reward or value other than a measle amount of dopamine and a cute character to play with. Secondly, the game is marketed towards older kids, teenagers and young adults on an age range of 12-25 years old, an age group where most individuals are either not mature enough to manage their money safely or even financially independent at all, with most people in this range not even being active members of society yet. Furthermore, the gacha-gambling model is largely unregulated and unsupervised by authority figures, be it responsible adults, laws or any other regulating institution.
To this, Garnt (largely) and Joey (in a lesser but still significant way) responded that, while they agree no one should be able or willing to spend such large amounts in these games, they do not pose significant harm to most people, and even further, can present justifiable value enough to be acceptable in their current forms, with minor changes. At one point, Joey expressed the idea that if these games made it difficult for him to spend money, he would mostly just not play them at all rather than go free-to-play. Garnt attempted to defend the idea that spending on these games was not necessary and going the F2P route was not only possible, but easy. He himself, however, admitted to that not being the case with him.
This is the thick and short of it. Now let me get into the main argument this post is attempting to make.
Connor's position along the entire discussion was entirely and utterly reasonable, and not only that, but even after being soft-gaslighted into being less harsh on his stance, he still was the only one willing to take the problem seriously at all.
Garnt and Joey, kn the other hand, began the discussion with an ironic and memey tone, not taking it at all seriously. When Connor's stance didn't change and his points began hitting a little too close to home, that's when they got defensive of their point and tried to appeal to various fallacious arguments and unbelievable takes. Most notably, Garnt defended that "If you have a problem with gambling or if you have poor self-control, you just should not be playing Gacha Games", which beyond being obvious, is a bonkers thing to say. It would be akin to saying "if you feel depressed or suicidal often, you should just ask for help and not kill yourself" or "if you have a drug problem, maybe don't go buy drugs". It is a statement that hides behind it's obvious correctness to take away attention from the fact that this adds nothing of value at all to the discussion,nor does it make for a suitable defense of the system that gacha ganes operate in.
The first big problem with this entire thing is that the three of them, both in the podcast and with their individual channels, have a great influencing power. Having your opinion, no matter who you are, broadcast to over a few hundred thousand people world-wide is bound to influence or resonate with some of the audience. When the person in question is a respected figure, speaking to an audience of admirers or fans, most of which at a young age, and within a subject matter of interest to the audience, the influence rate will grow even bigger. In this midst, there is statistically no way at least a handful of people didn't watch this episode and felt like they had their actions justified. Add to this that the gacha community at large is either aware but indifferent to the similarities it has to gambling, or straight up defensive of the entire model, and you have a pretty dangerous mixture of things here.
The second issue I see and hope to convey on this matter is that both Garnt and Joey seem unaware of just how scummy and messed up the tactics behind gacha games are. It's not just rate manipulation and constant advertising. The entire development process is centered around creating the perfect space for you to spend copious amounts of money without feeling that you really spent them. It goes so much deeper than just making cute girls to sell you. From the game page on the app store you get it from to the main menu, to the game design, to the in-game systems, to the rates, to the promotions, to the update cycle, to the end game, to the daily challenges, EVERY LITTLE ASPECT of it is engineered to rewire your bain into believing that it's not that bad to spend, and having the desire to do so more often than you reasonably would.
This is a very important one, amd Connor briefly touched on it in his rant. Cassinos, actual gambling places, build and thought to make you spend and lose, are like a glass door compared to the five inch lead wall that is the gacha strategy. They show you the rates at all times. They offer you the option to set yourself a limit. They make you aware that you are spending money, they cap the age at a minimum of 21, they have a lot of systems in place to control bad spenders. Of course, most of those came from law and regulations, but even before that, back in the 18th amd 19th centuries, no normal adult would advocate or defend that 12 to 18 year olds should be able to gamble real money into pieces of paper or cardboard cutouts. So imagine thinking, for even a moment, that what gacha games do is even close to okay. It is not, by any measure, morally, ethically or lawfully, okay.
But it gets worse. Way worse. Here is where I began actually worrying about the boys, in particular Joey and Garnt, the latter most of all.
They seem to actually believe that the above exposed is somehow justifiable based on little doses of dopamine, memories and the abstract idea of "the experience" you get. They compare spending ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS on a game to get TWO DIMENSIONAL IMAGINARY GIRLS to a night out with friends where you spend a hundred dollars in food or drinks.
What the actual f*ck.
This is not just bad. It's really, really bad. It's unreasonably and unbelievably absurd. It nearly collapses the entire concept of reality from just how bad a take this is.
No. No, no, no. NO. In no way, in no conceivable theoretical way, one of those things is comparable to the other. Never. This is the type of thing that depressed people tell themselves to justify self destructive behavior. Spending copious amounts of disposable income into games just to get "a daily dose lf dopamine" going is insane. Just for reference, you can get dopamine for free by doing any of the following:
Exercising
Finishing a task-list
Cleaning your room
Working on a passion project
Playing any sport, specially with friends
Going for a walk with you pet
Having a conversation with a friend or significant other
Having a good meal
Waking up from a good nap
Watching a fun movie
Traveling
Hiking
Riding a bike
Radical sports
Reading a good book
Seeing a long-time relative or friend you missed for a long time
Getting a hug
Having sex
Sleeping cuddled with you SO
Holding hands
Kissing
Watching the sun set/rise
Going to the beach
Camping
Playing an actual good videogame that isn't f*cking Genshin or FGO
This is not an exhaustive list. It's literally just things I thought off the top of my head while writing this. Some of those activities require some money to do, and some are impossible during the pandemic. But most of them are free/cheap and easy to do at home or with little to no contact with anyone.
If getting a good pull in a lootbox virtual casino is the best way you can think of to get any dopamine release, or if that release is so significant to you as to justify spending more money than some people make in a week, then I'm sorry, but you have a serious problem. I mean it. I know the Boys can do most or all of those things listed up there and much more. I know for a fact they are not in a situation of loneliness, vulnerability or isolation, even in the current world situation. So why is it that Garnt thinks gambling is a good solution for boredom in the quarentine? Or why did Joey insinuate that making it harder for him to spend money would just make him drop the game?
And if these two, that as I said are in a very privileged spot of having easy access to healthy ways to produce dopamine and conquer isolation, are having this kind of relationship with these games, what's to say of people around the world, including many of their listeners/viewers, who either live alone and/or have no perspective of a successful career with easy access to basically limitless disposable income like they do? What's to say of the teenagers who spend all night up playing games, watching anime, jerking off and stealing their parents' credit card to buy pulls? What's to say of the depressed university students who have a shitload of debt thrown at them and live an isolated, virtual life right now? What about them?
Joey and Garnt might not have any problem controlling themselves, or have enough money to waste such that a thousand dollars into gachas doesn't feel unreasonable, no matter how actually unreasonable it is. But they are either ignorant of the actual problem, or (and I sure hope I'm completely off on this one) completely unemphatic to their struggles. Because "Just don't play" is not a thing someone with empathy for the gambling addicts would say. Connor was deadass on this one.
And that leads us to the final nail in this horrific, goldplated coffin. The memes.
Yes, the memes.
There are so many memes. Garnt mentioned that "no one memes on the guys going bankrupt" while doing just that for half an hour. The entire gacha culture is basically a serious sociological and psychological problem deep-rooted into the heart of the zoomer generation. And yet it wears a mask mad e of memes, that hides the actual problem under a nearly impenetrable layer of irony, self-pity and depressive jokes. But the subject is not that funny under the magnified lens of a closer look.
The easygoing demeanor with which gacha addicts and casual underaged gamblers treat the entire thing is so light on the mood, so soft on the eyes, that you may just forget that those people might be ruining their lives. It's not a joke. It should not be treated like one. The meme culture around gacha fames has created more gambling addicts among 15 and 16 year olds than any illegal casino would ever dream of. These young people are just laughing away ridiculous sums of money for a teenager to spend, and feeling none of it until it is too late to go back and give up.
I am not trying to guilty trip any of the Boyys here, nor am I accusing them of being apologetic of underage gambling. I'm just trying to put this entire thing under a serious light. Because it needs someone to do so. This post comes from a place of worry and love, not one of disrespect or accusations. I simply want the Boys to look at this in a responsible way.
I might be talking to the walls here. I might really be just shouting in the vacuum. But if I can try to make my voice be listened to, I will. Because I must. If you read all the way down to here, I have two more things to say.
One is: please, do not let the monetization model these games operate in get to you. If you've spent any amount of money on them and feel tempted to continue, I insist you don't. If you have only ever played them without spending, and are still having fun, you're free to do so, but tread carefully.
And the other is: gacha mechanics can ruin much more beyond your financial wisdom. They are actively harmful to the games industry as a whole. Instead of making good games out of passion, these developers are being led to create mediocre games out of greed from the higher ups. If gou care about gaming at all, or if you just give a shit about an industry many people love, I request that you understand why gacha games are a bad sign, and that you spread that awareness, if you can. This is a really important subject to me and I think ut should be to other gamers as well.
Thank you for reading. Have a great day. Save your money.
P.S.: Garnt, Joey and Connor. If you guys read this, I love you and what you do. I listen to this podcast almost religiously, and I really enjoy all of it. Please, take care of yourselves and have a great 2021. Peace. (This is a shot in the dark, the chances of them reading this are so low I feel almost stupid. But hey, I tried huh?)

I spent several hours this past week coaching traders at my prop firm. And something caught my attention…
Every single one of these traders needed help with the same thing.
It has to do with what I call the “reverse” gambler’s fallacy. And it’s something many traders struggle with.
Today, I’ll show you how to get this common obstacle under control… and start earning more consistent returns year after year…
What Most New Traders Get Wrong
The obstacle I’m talking about is trading psychology. It’s a very broad term used to describe the emotional side of trading.
Almost all new traders believe the most important part of trading is being able to analyze markets like a pro.
On the surface, this logic makes sense. After all, if you can reliably forecast which direction to take on a trade, the money should take care of itself… right?
What these novices don’t yet understand is that something special happens the moment you commit your money to a trade…
You start feeling things.
Whether it’s fear, excitement, anxiety, or a mix of all three, no one is immune to these emotions. And they can wreak havoc on even the best planned trades.
You may be able to call the direction, the timing, and the target price to perfection… But it can all be for nothing if you are unable to stick to your trade plan.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen traders plan out a great trade… But then ended up somehow losing money, or not being in the market when the move they’d forecast played out.
So how do you beat your emotions to become a better, more consistent trader? It comes down to the three key parts of trading. Let me explain…
The Three-Legged Stool of Trading
I think of trading as a three-legged stool.
Your methodology/strategy for picking trades is the first leg. Your risk- and trade-management strategy is the second leg. And the third leg is your trading psychology.
In my experience, most traders focus on the first leg (strategy and methodology), and they neglect the other two legs. But the stool needs all three legs to stand on its own.
Over the years, I’ve honed my own proprietary method to develop well-rounded traders. Here’s what I’ve learned…
The first fundamental building block of a profitable trader is to establish a proven strategy/methodology you can use to identify good trades. In my experience, everything follows from this foundation.
How you manage your risk and your trades should be determined by the strategies you employ. Your trading psychology likewise will be influenced by your approach to risk and trade management.
I’ve seen other trading instructors assign arbitrary percentage values to the three legs of the trading stool. Usually these values are divided up like this: 30% to the level of importance on the analytical strategy, 30% to risk and trade management, and 40% to trading psychology.
But I don’t believe that any one leg is more important than the other. And yet I’ve found that, more often than not, traders neglect risk/trade management and psychology.
So how do you stop neglecting these two important areas to become a more well-rounded trader? That’s where our reverse gambler’s fallacy comes in…
​
Time to Ditch the Casino Mentality
There is one block that seems to stop traders from progressing to working on the other two legs.
That is, they don’t know how to flip the switch from thinking about their trades as individual trades in a vacuum… to thinking about them as a collection that relies on a statistical edge to net a profit.
Most traders run into this problem at some point in their careers. And if you’re frustrated with your trading right now, chances are you may be struggling with this, too.
It’s known as the casino mentality. And it’s the same mindset that amateur gamblers will take with them into Caesars Palace or the Bellagio.
It doesn’t matter if they’re seated at the blackjack table or standing over the roulette wheel. Most gamblers believe that the hand or spin they are about to play is the opportunity to hit a winner.
After all, if the roulette wheel has landed four black spins in a row, the next one surely must be red, right?
In reality, the chances of the roulette ball landing on black or red is even, at about 47.4% each. This means each spin is independent of the last.
This is also known as the gambler’s fallacy. What’s interesting is that I’ve observed a kind of reverse gambler’s fallacy from many traders…
This occurs when a trader, who does in fact have a statistically proven strategy, goes on a losing streak… And then instead of continuing to trust their strategy, they abandon it altogether.
How to Avoid the “Reverse” Gambler’s Fallacy
I saw this logical fallacy in effect this past week during one of my coaching calls.
The trader I was coaching had recently taken a technical setup that simply did not work. He was convinced he had done something wrong and wanted my help in improving his analysis.
But his analysis was great.
He didn’t do anything wrong in identifying the setup, which was textbook in nature. But the setup looked so good that, when it resulted in a loss, the trader was convinced that he was the problem… That he did something wrong.
The lesson I imparted to him, which I now want to pass on to you, is this very simple truth…
Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever takes a trade thinking it is going to be a loser. Every single trade you take will be because you thought it would make you money.
Despite this feeling of confidence, out of 100 trades, you’d be lucky to win 50% of them.
That’s why a great trader is not defined by what percentage of their trades end up as winners or losers. A great trader is defined by whether or not they are net profitable after taking 100 trades.
If you win roughly as many trades as you lose, but your winners make you 2x or 3x the amount of money you give back on your losers, you will end up with a nice profit at the end of the year.
Remember, nobody ever takes a trade thinking it is not going to work out. This is why it is absolutely crucial to abandon the idea of thinking about your trades as individual trades.
Instead, start taking a more data-driven, statistical approach to your trading. What do I mean by that?
Keeping a longer-term perspective on your trading is the key to longevity in this business. What your numbers look like over the next 100, 200, or 300 trades is far more relevant and important than losing your cool because you lost a handful of trades in a row.
Of course, to be able to make it to 300 trades, you must have a rock-solid risk management plan in place.
I don’t see gamblers at the casino take a professional approach very often. It’s rare to see someone bet small and stick to the odds on every play. It’s far more common for gamblers to be all over the place with the size of their bets.
They may start off betting small, but after winning a couple of hands of blackjack, they get overconfident and take an outsized bet. Sure enough, on that next hand they go bust while the house just happens to hit blackjack.
This is how casinos make money from gamblers. And it’s how the market parts amateur traders from their capital.
No doubt, it takes a lot of hard work and discipline to make the transition from amateur to professional. But, I promise you, the rewards make it all worthwhile. Until next time.
Regards,

I keep coming back to how we first met the Sanctumites. Four of the primes, the most powerful and revered class on the planet, hijacking a spaceship to hijack another larger spaceship to get the fuck out of there. And then there's the first interaction of Clarke and Rose at the end of 6.02, "Isn't this your home?" Now it's true we do sort of finally have an explanation for Kaylee and her family's escape attempt in the most recent episode. Kaylee killed Josephine and they needed to leave before she can be revived and the others find out. Obviously Josie does not play well with others, but I think this runs a lot deeper than that.
It's clear that this season is all about hell and demons. Which is surprising to those of us who had money on puppies and ice cream, but I've been told perhaps I'm watching the wrong show. John's terrified of going to hell, but John what if you're already here?

l'enfer c'est les autres

Change is the only constant in the universe. Empires crumble, mountains wear down to valleys, rivers dry up, even the stars blink out or explode. Maybe hell is simply the absence of change. Being locked in an eternal unbreakable cycle. This part, it never gets any easier, Simone says as Josephine cries out in panic. Still experiencing her last death, and perhaps her first death. Russell's original sin. Or perhaps his original sin was what came next. The covering up of the first. His inability to move past it, trapping them all in that moment.
It's striking to me how little the arrival of earthlings seems to interest the average Sanctumite. It has been 230 years since they've had any news of their home planet. You would think that news of its destruction would be a bigger event. Joesephine is apparently a sports fan, but she doesn't even ask if the Jaguars ever won the Superbowl (Jason, I can't predict the future... but no). Instead the earthlings seem to represent only a chance to escape, or a chance to continue their existence, or an opportunity to upset the balance of power. The dome keeps people out, but it also seems to keep people in. Sure the Primes with their Nightblood can leave, but they don't. Bellamy remarks in the last episode for 230 years just how little they've explored this moon.
As for the primes themselves they seem curiously trapped in the ages they were when they died. Kaylee's family is upsidedown when we meet them. The two youngest in the oldest bodies, but it is clear that Kaylee has maintained a childlike persona from her interactions with Josephine. The same older girl who bullied her over 200 years ago still torments her today. And Josephine herself the eternal capricious teenager. Twirling her hair and asking her parents if her music is too loud in her room.
Trapped. Closed door. No Exit. It's the name of an episode of a tv show about another group of immortal robots with weird ideas about religion and an obsession with procreation. It's also a play of some note. In it hell has no mirrors. You cannot see your own reflection and thus must be judged by the way the others trapped there with you see yourself. I don't know. I'm not a philosopher. Hell I'm not even French.

You say you want a revolution

If the Primes live in a world of constants and order, the Children live in a world of perpetual chaos and change. Bug swarms, weird alien plant life, madness inducing eclipses and a temporal anomaly that can make a million years pass in a single second. Two opposites at war with each other. A Song of Vampire Robots and Temporal Anomalies. It has a certain ring to it.
Some people interpreted the Children of Gabriel's words meaning they were trying to save the Primes. I though they meant that they were trying to save the hosts, but maybe they want to save them both. Free the Primes from their prison of their own construction. And Gabriel's construction too.
After all death is life. Two sides one coin. Now I am become death. Clarke quotes it in season one. She is quoting Oppenheimer who said it as he witnessed the test of the first atomic bomb. But he was in turn quoting Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita who is also the preserver. To quote a text of another religious tradition, for everything there is a season. Even radiation which causes so much destruction throughout the series is also a force of creation. "They say aging is a natural process, but it's actually a fault in our genes", Annihilation a film that inspires much of what we've seen so far in season six. A cell's death is coded into it, without that it could reproduce unchanging forever. But what do you call a cell that reproduces without changing or dying, but a cancer. Eternal life for the cell means death for the organism. And what do we do with cancer, we cut it out. Radiation causes cancer, but without the random mutations that lead inextricably to cancer, we wouldn't have the other random mutations that led to life in the first place. Ever changing ever evolving ever dying life. Eternal life for the organism means death for the species. Death is life is death is life. To quote yet another spiritual text, the pop rock ballad of Imagine Dragons about radiation safety, "it's a revolution, I suppose."

There must be some kind of way out of here

But what of our own jokers and thieves and Azgeda spies? Murphy, Echo, Emori they have all changed much since we first met them. Struggled to redefine themselves. The exiles who were cast out to die, but came back and became heroes and space ship pilots. And the cold hearted spy who opened herself up to family, friendship and love. But can you ever really change while you are stuck with the people, les autres who still you see you as the same archetype you were cast into? John would do anything to avoid hell, but in doing so is he going to walk straight through its gates?
And if you are Echo and you are trying to help your boyfriend through the process of dealing with the loss of his sister. But are you trying to help him feel emotionally whole or are you just trying to get your forces up to full strength. You need Bellamy and Octavia, for the mission. And when he accuses you of this. Of being the cold hearted spy you used to be, maybe still are. Do you prove him right and shut down or open yourself up. Become more vulnerable than ever before.

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille

And what of Bellamy Blake? The would be protector who couldn't protect the one he wanted to the most, from her own worst enemy. Who gave up on his sister? Or the monster she has become. The monster who killed the sister he once knew. Who now holds the rest of his family together all the tighter. But they see him for what he's lost too. Jordan calls him on it in the most recent episode. How can he be their protector when he's still reeling.
He couldn't forgive Blodreina, but he tries again and again to forgive the one who leaves. Wanheda. The one who left him in Polis to fight in the pits, at Becca's lab, in the fields outside Camp Jaha. She's left him again. Just when he needed her the most. And now he's trapped. Literally immobilized in his own personal hell. Staring into the face of the one he loves but there's something else there now. How do you move on when you are trapped in this cycle. Shutting down and closing off is a trap, but opening up and showing vulnerability can be another sort of trap as well.

It's all about taking the easy way out for you, I suppose

It's no surprise his sister, is in the forest with the children. She was always the embodiment of change and chaos. She who was born without a place in the world and thus was fated to break it apart. Like one too many neutrons in the nucleus. Again and again she destroyed the old world into a million pieces until she tried to put it back together. But the being of pure and constant change, of liquid metal cooled and grew hard and brittle. Refused to change course until one day it broke her.
Now she worships death even more than the children. She longs for it. It's her way out. But death is not absolution. Real change, redemption hurts like hell. It means accepting all the things you've done. All the things it's cost you. And moving forward with it anyway. It means rebirth and renewal, but never erasure. It's no surprise she would prefer death, the alternative must seem impossible. But Diyoza knows better. She's still breathing.

Know when to fold 'em

Addiction is a chemical process whereby your brain can become wired to certain self destructive behavior but there is a psychological component as well. The sunk cost fallacy is the idea that humans will tend to value previous investments in a plan or strategy even when they are proven to be unrecoverable. It is the desire to make the things that have already been lost "worth it". It is common among gamblers and people who write long forum posts and are beginning to wonder just what they set out on and why there are suddenly so many Kenny LogginsRogers ^{thanks Palemaiden} references. Octavia said it after she destroyed the farm. She needed them to march on Eden. She needed to show everyone why it was all necessary. The pits, the cannibalism. It all would have been worth it. It all would have made sense. If they had just made it to the garden.
Now Abby, Octavia's biggest critic has picked up her mantra. She needs Kane to live because he is her absolution. He is the one who will erase, will wash away all her sins. If he lives then her cannibalism, her guiding of Octavia's hand, even the things she did while addicted to the pills would all be redeemed. Kane is Abby's Eden. And she is prepared to send everyone to hell to get there.

Find my nest of salt

And what of the girl who left. The one who wanted to change more than any of them. To do better. She wrote the words down on paper and they floated away. She became what they wanted her to. All apologies. She bore it so they didn't have to. She became the bad guy. But change is more than just words. All they did was hollow her out. And then she let her guard down. She made herself more vulnerable than ever before. Took off her murder clothes and danced. And something evil crawled inside her.
Now she's trapped in her own hell. As everyone else sees the worst possible version of her come to life. Locked away somewhere in her own mind. With all of her worst personal traumas. Can she process them and not simply run from them or apologize for them. Surrender to them, accept them as part of who she is, who she has become and move forward. Or will she be trapped forever repeating the same event like our new friends?
If you can't tell from the million words I am enjoying the new season... and I hate the fuckin' eagles, man.

Hi, I will be discussing a topic today that has not been talked about on the sub: 6 cognitive biases that are holding you back from analyzing units fairly and building better "off-meta" squads. I have a background in competitive Pokemon and Hearthstone and similar articles have been written for those games so I figured that it would be worthwhile to make an article about this topic with relation to Brave Frontier. I am simply interested in this area and am not a professional in psychology (at least not yet) so I will be taking all definitions from Wikipedia. This article was largely inspired by an article about Magic: The Gathering. Whenever I mention a point about choosing whether to summon for a unit, I am not targeting players who have the resources to pull for any and all units, but rather the players who have limited resources and need to make informed decisions on whether a given unit is worth summoning for.
A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that affects the decisions and judgments that people make. This can lead to poor judgment and biased thinking. As such, these biases can affect how we judge and analyse units and squads in Brave Frontier. The cognitive biases I am covering are also largely applicable outside of Brave Frontier so I hope this will be a worthwhile read for the whole community.

1. Distinction Bias

The tendency to view two options as more distinctive when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
When 2 subjects are compared side by side, they are often considered more dissimilar than they actually are. Distinction bias can magnify small differences between 2 similar units and can even be decisive factor in whether a player pulls for a unit.
For example, a player with Krantz as his main mitigator will probably be very satisfied with Krantz, but when a Stein rateup gate is released, he might be prompted to compare Krantz and Stein side by side and point out that Stein has important buffs on his SP options such as BC fill when attacked and status ailment negation, which makes Stein a much more attractive mitigator that he should pull for, and hence overrate Stein by comparing him to Krantz and listing out buffs that Stein has but Krantz does not. In actuality, a player with Krantz alone will most likely not require Stein as they accomplish very similar roles (2 turn mitigation, burst healing, etc.) and Krantz has his own unique buffs and traits such as BC/HC droprate, stats from his extra skill and cheap BB costs that make him a good mitigator in his own right.
We can compensate for this by reminding ourselves to evaluate a unit on its own. When juxtaposing a unit with another similar unit, take into consideration that distinction bias exists and avoid blowing up small differences in their kits which would otherwise be unnoticeable if not compared simultaneously.

2. Conservatism Bias

The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.
This is a problem that many of us do not realize. It is easier to hold on to an old belief and simply tweak it slightly (or not at all) when new information is released which disputes that original notion.
For a long time, the community believed that using Double Avant leads for Frontier Hunter were the best for getting the highest damage numbers, even when UBB-ing. However, after alternative setups that were not using Avants were discovered (some by yours truly), many players refused to believe that it was possible, because Avant's leader skill provided so much damage.
By having a more open mind towards opinions or strategies that have merit but contradict what we know, we can learn better and faster by being more accepting of the fact that sometimes, our view of the metagame and the best squads and units available might not be the most optimal.

3. Selective Perception

The tendency to allow our expectations to influence perception.
We tend to see what we want or expect to see and overlook stimuli which contradicts our beliefs or expectations.
When we build squads for any sort of content in Brave Frontier, we are hoping that they work out well. As such, we tend to focus on evidence that confirms that they are great squads, while dismissing information that point out their flaws.
I have two friends who were discussing Endless FG squads a while back, and both of them created squads that each had their unique characteristics. However, the discussion became heated when they began criticizing each other's squads and pinpointing how the squad that the other theorized would fail to reach stage 300. Neither person wanted the other to be nitpicking the flaws of the squad that they took time to theorize.
As much as we like our expectations to be affirmed, we should be aware that we are looking through rose-tinted glasses very often, and take those glasses off to seriously consider the blind spots or shortcomings.

4. Anchoring Bias

The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions.
When new unit information is released, players tend to over-rely on the first unit analysis post or video that they see as those will usually be their main reference points.
While it is fine to agree with what is covered in unit analysis threads/videos and use the information to help you decide whether to pull for a unit, what content the unit excels in and what SP builds to go for, they should not be the be-all and end-all of information.
It is a good practice to forge your own opinions on a new unit first, before reading the unit analysis posts or videos. You might find something new that others have not considered which you might not have realized if you relied solely on those outlets for unit analysis.

5. Availability Cascade

A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains increasing plausibility through its rising repetition in public discourse.
We are constantly relying on the Internet for information on just about anything. We rely on this subreddit for much of our information on Brave Frontier. The problem arises when the original information is incorrect or has loopholes that have not been addressed but continues to spread, with more players that receive this erroneous information simply repeating and spreading it, hence "validating" it and making the information difficult to challenge.
Such was the case for Ciara's supposed lack of viability in FH or FG1 squads. When OE Ciara was released, a few players were quick to pick up on the fact that Ciara's buffs were delayed due to her animation which killed her use in 0 ms delay squads. Some players began saying that Ciara was unusable for nuke squads, and this information quickly spread.
I decided to do some testing for UBB nuke squads utilizing Ciara and found that with appropriate ms delay timings, she could activate her buffs for the entire squad and squad damage was decent. D3monicUnicorn made a post about utilizing Ciara in an autobattle nuke squad for FH and FG1. So were they all wrong? Or were we wrong?
The most likely answer is that the players who originally labelled Ciara as garbage for any kind of nuke squad (not only for 0 ms) did not explore or entertain the concept of non 0 ms sequences, and more people just repeated the original sentiment.
Common knowledge might not always be correct. When your findings contradict the popular opinion, you are not always going against a horde of players, it might very well be the opinion from a few players that were repeated over and over.

6. Gambler's Fallacy

The tendency to believe that the onset of a certain random event is less likely to happen following an event or a series of events.
This last one does not pertain to unit analysis or squadbuilding but I figured I would cover it anyway.
Sometimes we love gacha, and sometimes we hate gacha. But one very common sentiment that players experience when summoning is the urge to summon 1 more time after a series of failed summons, hoping that the probability of them pulling the unit they want in the subsequent summon will be higher than the last because they had failed to pull the unit. As we all know, each summon gacha is an independent event (assuming gates with x10 rates are at x10 rates already) so past summons have no bearing on future summons.
On this note, perhaps x10 rateup summon gates were designed to prey on the gambler's fallacy, but that is another post for another day.

Closing Thoughts

While Brave Frontier is mostly a PvE game with few "competitive" events, we can still be better informed players by being aware of these cognitive biases that affect our knowledge and game sense. They are also good to know as they all have real life applications. Hopefully this article was helpful to you in some way. I would appreciate conducive discussion regarding the points that I raised and any other related topics. Cheers!

Merching is the least effort money making method in RuneScape that's not bannable (unless you are conducting price manipulation). The reason why people give up on it so quickly is because it doesn't give instant results. You might not make a lot of money at first, but trust me - if you keep doing it, the rhythm will kick in and the results will follow.
Before I begin, I would like to clarify that the only "merching" I do is short-term flipping. That is, buying low and selling high the instant you buy the item. I do not believe in long-term investments because in my experience, it is no different from gambling. Unless you have insider info (meaning you have information everyone else doesn't), you can't predict whether or not the price of an item will rise or drop. For example, there's no way to know if an item like Bandos Boots will be necessary in future raids unless a Jagex developer tells you.
Now let's talk about flipping. There is only one reliable reason why flipping makes money - because players need to instantly gratify themselves by buying/selling an item(s) ASAP. To one player, losing out on 50k by instantly selling an Abyssal whip might not be much to them, as they can probably make that back in 5 mins. But, because one player is losing out on 50k, someone else will be making that 50k.
50k may not be a lot of money, but understand that it won't just be one player that will be doing this; thousands of other players will be as well. When you start flipping a certain item, you become a temporary vendor for that item. That 50k comes from holding the item on your account so that it will be instantly available for the next person buying the item. It's like owning your own retail store, except that the only expense you need to pay is your membership fee. You don't need to pay for rent, utilities, shipping, or storage fees because using the GE is completely free. Since you don't even need to be online to have an offer on the GE, then you will literally be making transactions without even having to play.
With that being said, I'll be going over a set of tips on what you need to keep in mind to flip successfully.
Tip #1: You have to be willing to spend the time to find a decently profitable item.
The fun part about merching is that you need to try a bunch of different items before you find something that will give you decent margins. You need to find this item yourself because nobody and I mean NOBODY in their right mind will tell people what they are successfully flipping. If I tell everyone what I'm flipping right now, then everyone will try flipping that item and then nobody will be making any money after because there will be too many merchers on that one item. The key is to find an item where there are less merchers than there are non-merchers. And the only way to do that is to try a bunch of different items before you hit the jackpot. When you find that item, then congrats!
Keep in mind though that your margins might not last forever, because the ratio of merchers to non-merchers of an item can change. When that happens, you should consider finding another good item that few merchers are working on. If you haven't found a good item yet, then keep looking and don't settle.
Tip #2: You have to stop treating money like you're clinging on to it for dear life.
Because if you do, then you won't be any different from the hordes of people that get merched when they panic sell a crashing item.
Why is this difficult to do? Because it takes courage.
If you want to flip successfully, then you need to give yourself permission to fail. The most successful merchers have also taken the most heaviest losses. If you get stuck on the thought of potential losses you might incur if something crashes, then you won't have the guts to take the risk of potentially making a ton of money as well. Remember, the highest margins go to whomever takes the risk of trying out a new item first.
This is most notable when you flip at a loss. Investor Psychology claims that investors tend to invest more with their profits. However, just because you made a loss doesn't mean you will continue to do so. Continuing to flip when you're making a net loss sets you apart from the rest of the pack. If you can't sell the item at the same price as what you bought it for, don't be afraid to take the loss (don't instant sell it though, make a reasonable offer above the market price). There is no guarantee that the item will go back up anytime soon and the money you get from taking the loss can be used for more flipping attempts which can result in profits. Also, don't be afraid to flip the same item that you already made a loss on. Learn from your mistakes and try again.
Tip #3: The GE price charts and guide price are completely useless.
Price charts are not an indicator for future prices. Chart patterns are myths and whether or not an item went up or down a month ago doesn't affect what will happen tomorrow. Think of it as gambler's fallacy. The results of previous outcomes do not affect future outcomes. Just because an item has risen 10 days in a row does not mean that it will be more likely for it to crash the next day compared to an item that has just started rising.
Charts are only useful for hindsight analysis such as comparing an item's price with the release of an update or identifying evidence of price manipulation. Unfortunately none of these uses will help you with flipping.
The GE guide price is just the prediction of the average price based on previous prices. Using the same logic as the GE price charts, the guide price is also meaningless. To find the market price for a specific time, you need to do the one-item test. To do this, you buy one unit of the item you plan on flipping which will give you the instant buy price (and vice versa for instant sell price). This will give you a good idea of what buy/sell prices you want to offer in the GE.
Tip #4: Understand the logic behind price manipulation and why it's not related to flipping.
Items don't have an inherent value. The price of an item is determined by how much the stakeholders on average value that item. If everyone is convinced that an AGS is worth 1b, then it's worth 1b. If everyone is convinced that an AGS is worth 1 gp, then it's worth 1 gp.
Back in 2009, there were groups of price manipulators called "merch clans". These clans create what most people call "artificial demand". It's a demand that's created due to at least one person believing the merch clan's "advice" to invest in X item. If just one person starts believing the clan, more people will likely join in. This type of demand is mostly generated from at least one person blindly believing someone else's claims instead of using their own judgment. So for example, instead of testing an item yourself before investing in it, you simply invest in item outright without using your own deduction to why it's a good investment. This tactic was effective because of aggressive advertising from clans, and it was mostly targeted towards players that had no experience with merching and thought they had the solution if they do what the merch clan says.
The only difference between present-day RS and 2009 is the fact that Jagex will ban anyone that decides to advertise a merch clan in-game. Because aggressive advertising will give away the fact that you're conducting price manipulation, it's much more difficult to convince players to invest in an item.
So why does it still exist? If one person or clan has the purchasing power to buy a large quantity of X item, then they will reduce the supply of that item for the rest of the players. Because there are fewer of X item, the remaining players will offer more money to compete for the reduced supply. It's much less effective than before because of the removal of mass advertising. It's harder to convince people to blindly invest in X item, therefore the remaining players use their own judgment to determine whether or not to invest in it.
Because of this, price manipulation has absolutely nothing to do with short-term flipping. An item being manipulated will not affect your ability to profit from it by buying low and selling high.

Introduction
We’ve all experienced it: you sim 6 nodes to get a shard and none drop. Or you buy a 120 energy refill and try 15 times to get a purple bit and get none of them. And it always seems to happen at the worst time, such as when you only need one more item. It’s infuriating, and it makes it seem like the game is bugged, or even nefariously programmed against your interests.
The CG developers have denied any sort of manipulation of the odds. And when I look at numbers over a long time I believe them. So what’s really going on here? A combination of phenomena: random numbers are weird; probability is hard to understand; and people’s perceptions are colored by biases they often don’t realize they even have.
I hope the following helps some of you understand what’s going on here. Please don’t view this as me lecturing from on high, incidentally, because I’ve fallen prey to all of these things myself.
Random Numbers are Weird
People do not understand random numbers. In fact, people are so bad at understanding them that humans cannot generate truly random numbers. (Try it yourself: attempt to come up with a list of 10 random numbers between 1 and 10. You will find that after the first couple, you will be thinking about what number should come next. You will be influenced by what the previous numbers were. The results will not be random. In particular, humans will tend to “distribute” the numbers to something that seems random, fearing that duplicates are not “random enough”. As an example, I just used a computer to randomly generated these numbers: 1, 1, 2, 4, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 4, 3, 1. No human would generate a sequence like this because there are so many duplicated numbers, and all but 1 is 5 or below, so it seems “unrandom”.)
A major confusion comes in the form of believing that if a random chance has a particular value that this means you should always, or usually, get the stated percentage. So if there’s 1/3 chance of a shard dropping from a hard mission, simming it 3 times should always or usually give 1 shard.
The truth is that random numbers are unpredictable and do not tend to follow consistent patterns (see the example 10 numbers above). Long stretches of uneven results are not only normal, they are expected. In the case of a 1/3 chance of a shard and 3 hard missions, the chances of getting exactly 1 shard are actually less than 50%. More than 50% of the time, you will get some other value (0, 2 or 3). Streaks are also entirely normal with random numbers. This is what makes people think that there are bugs, or the game is cheating against them. Here’s an example. Yesterday I decided to keep track of enemies in GW/Arena when Old Daka was on the team to see how often enemies self-revived. The nominal odds of this are 10%. At one point, I experienced a streak where there were 7 self-revives out of 25 kills in only 5 games. That’s 28%, almost triple the expected number! But then later on, I had another streak where there were only 2 self-revives out of 43 kills, which is less than half the expected value. These streaks are entirely normal.
People Do Not Understand Probabilities
One of the reasons why games like this exist, and why lotteries and casinos make a fortune, is that probability is hard to understand. People tend to make assumptions about odds that are false. They also tend to believe they have a better chance at a good outcome than they do.
Lotteries are an easy example. Have you ever noticed that the Powerball numbers always seem to be random, unrelated numbers? For example, they are usually something like 5, 17, 32, 39, 61 and 70. When is the last time you saw a lottery where the winning numbers were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6? If this ever happened, it would make the news, people would scream and claim that the game was rigged. In reality though, that result is just as likely as any other. Think about how many times you have seen lottery numbers and how you probably never have seen a regular pattern like that (or 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, etc.) That gives you an idea of just how unlikely it is that you will ever strike it rich.
People also again expect to see odds “even out” over time, which doesn’t always happen. Each random occurrence is independent of the others, and the cosmos is not keeping track. While over a long time the average will tend to converge to the probability rate, this is because the numbers get very large so differences become less important in percentage terms. It doesn’t mean that after a long stretch of misses on a sim that you are “due” to get shard drops. This is called the Gambler’s Fallacy, and has made many people walk out of a casino with their pockets empty and a sour look on their faces.
Let’s think about those hard missions again. You have probably simmed a hard mission 3 times and gotten 0 shards and felt frustrated. And then said to yourself: “How come I get 0 so often and never seem to get 3? I should be getting 3 sometimes to offset all these 0s!” I’ve been there. Would you be surprised to learn that, if the chance is really 1/3, the odds of getting a 0 result are 8 times higher than getting a 3 result? That’s how the math works out. In fact, with a 1/3 chance, you should get 0/3 almost 30% of the time. That’s why it happens so often.
(Full odds assuming 1/3 chance: 0/3 result 8/27 times; 1/3 result 12/27; 2/3 result 6/27; 3/3 result 1/27).
What about double-simming two hard nodes, so 6 tries? Assuming 1/3 chance, you should get 6/6 only 1 out of 729 tries. The game’s only been open for something like 45 days, so if 6/6 has never happened to you, that’s why: the odds say it shouldn’t. But the odds of getting 0/6 are only 1 in 11, or 64x as often as a 6/6 result. So you should have had this happen, on average, at least once every two weeks. That’s why it seems like the game isn’t being fair.. it’s just the math not being fair.
Now this assumes a 1/3 chance of a drop. If it is lower, as I suspect, things get even worse. If the odds are 1/4 to get a drop, then your chances of going 0/3 increase from 32% to 43%. Your odds of going 3/3 decrease from 3.7% all the way to 1.6%.
If the odds of a purple item dropping are 15%, then if you sim 15 times, you should go 0/15 8.7% of the time, or about once every 12 refills. If you refill 3 times per day, you should EXPECT to get 0/15 every few days.
Confirmation Bias
This is a scientific term that describes the tendency of people to assign more weight to outcomes that match their preconceived notions than outcomes that contradict them. Simply put, when something happens that matches what we expect, we notice it and tend to use it to confirm our beliefs. When something happens that doesn’t match what we expect, we tend to either not notice it, or disregard it as being “atypical” or otherwise not relevant.
For example, I’ve read several comments over the last few days that “drop rates have been reduced since the update”. This is possible, but I doubt it. I don’t notice any difference. But if you are convinced that this is the case, you will tend to notice cold streaks much more than hot streaks and believe that this is proof that your theory is correct. This isn’t malicious, it’s just how most people work.
This sort of thing also leads to superstitions that get passed around, usually when something happens out of coincidence but a person finds a pattern that they believe explains it. For example, yesterday I saw someone say that if he is having a cold streak trying to farm a purple gear item, he goes and does something else and then comes back and has better luck. No programmer would write code that works in this way, so this is purely psychological. (It’s actually good advice, but not because it actually works, but rather because it encourages you to cool down rather than getting aggravated, so you view things more clearly.)
Another example: when I was having trouble getting Dooku shards someone suggested to me that I not do Dooku first but rather some other character I cared less about, and come back and do Dooku later, because he had better luck this way. I tried it, and it made no difference at all. Again, I highly doubt the developers bothered to tweak the odds based on what order you sim missions. It’s just a cognitive bias he developed because he had better luck doing Dooku later in the day a couple of times.
“Red Light Syndrome”
We tend to notice things more when they are unusual, when they are annoying, and when they happen at what seems like a bad time. Ever tried to drive somewhere and you hit every red light? Ever noticed that this always seems to happen when you are running late or in a hurry? Of course the traffic lights don’t know anything about your schedule. You just NOTICE the red lights more when you hit a lot of them, and especially when you are in a hurry. I’ve actually tried to look at this phenomenon and noticed that sometimes I actually hit all the green lights. But I have to pay attention to notice them. When I hit all the red lights I need no effort to notice it.
This happens in games as well. You notice the 0/6 because it irritates you; you notice the 4/6 much less because it’s a good outcome (and also because you “expect it” since you are “overdue” from having so many 0/6 results).
I have in the past remarked that I never seem to get 3/3 from hard missions. Yesterday I paid close attention and it happened to me 3 times, on different characters. But I probably would have glossed over it if I hadn’t deliberately been paying attention.
The “in a hurry” part comes in with a game when you are trying to get that last shard or item drop. You have 79/80 shards and you sim 10 times and get 0 drops. Clearly the game must be deliberately torturing you by lowering the odds! It’s not true. I’ve actually examined this and found no difference in drop rates as I approach an unlock point. It just SEEMS this way because you are paying much more attention to shard #80 than, say, shard #17.
So, no, the game is not trying to prevent you from getting that character you want. You are just noticing every failed attempt because it's important to you.
The same thing happens when you are running low on a resource. Say you only have enough energy for 4 tries at something.. you'll notice if you fail at those 4 much more than 4 tries first thing after a refresh.

Hey folks how ya doing.
Okay, so today we're going to go over tips and tricks to spot agent provocateur tactics, the importance of reviewing post history, and some key rules to remember when engaging with opposing viewpoints of questionable integrity.
First of all, let's differentiate between Trolling and Shilling. A lot of people will say they are the same thing out of ignorance. That's not to say that someone who equates the two is stupid, just uninformed as to the real relation between the terms.
So let's get started.
PART ONE: TROLLS
We'll kick this off with a definition:
Troll (informal): make a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.
Trolling is, at its core, a morally bankrupt activity. Regardless of belief in the content of the message, trying to Troll someone is primarily an attempt to elicit a negative response out of someone else. As such, Trolling comes in many forms, and usually commit a fallacy of some kind.
Some Trolls are more subtle than others. On one end of the spectrum is the Low-Effort Troll, trying to get a rise out of someone purely through Personal Attacks, Imitation-Baiting, Excessive use of Sarcasm/Questioning/Italics, etc. These Trolls are easy to spot.
On the other hand, the High-Effort Troll will incorporate sneakiness: Feigned Agreement, Appeal to Authority and Undermining Tactics. A Troll that starts out agreeing with you will be harder to spot, and often will hook their target deeply into discussion before they realize they are being trolled. A lot of High-Effort Trolling tactics involve the ambiguity of emotional load that comes with conversing entirely through the written word: Always remember that words and sentences can have multiple meanings depending on inflection, and if you are in doubt about the sincerity of a comment, always try speaking it out loud a few times with different levels of implied sarcasm in your voice. If it seems like the argument could turn against you easily, be cautious.
So how do you fight a Troll? It's simple: you don't. The Troll is there specifically to fight. By engaging him, you ensure his victory. Your argument may be airtight, you might bring all the evidence you need to convince any rational person. The Troll doesn't care, he's already made you waste your time and gotten a rise out of you. So remember the cardinal rule of internet discourse: DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
PART TWO: SHILLS
Time for another definition. This one is a little older, and not directly relevant to Shilling on the Internet, but I picked it because it exposes the core deceit at play:
Shill (slang): a confidence trickster's assistant, esp a person who poses as an ordinary customer, gambler, etc, in order to entice others to participate.
The Shill is the guy on the street, beating the Huckster at Three-Card Monty, waving around a stack of twenties that he just won for everybody to see. If Trolling is a morally bankrupt activity, Shilling is moral corruption. The Shill may know they are in the wrong (and likely do), but does not care as long as they make money. As a result, Shilling is a higher art-form than Trolling. While the Troll can skate by on base insults or sarcasm, the Shill must be a seasoned debater, be able to argue a position well, and must have the resources to debunk or otherwise undermine the position of their opponent. If they are a true Shill, they will be all of these things. After all, they are by definition paid for their services.
The most important distinction between a Shill and a Troll is a matter of targeting. Where you, the debater, is the target for a Troll, the Shill is targeting the audience, i.e. the random person who curiously stumbles into the thread and doesn't know what to think about the subject at hand. The Shill isn't paid to enrage the skeptic, he is paid to influence the debate.
The effective Shill will have their own method of undermining an argument, but will generally use one of three methods. They are all effective if executed well, and are all psychological in nature.

1. The Professor: This tactic attempts to present the Shill as the rational, intelligent side of the argument. He will seem to take the moral and logical high ground. His verbosity will only be matched by the scalpel-like precision with which he wields it. He will refer you to mainstream news articles proving his point. This is a very effective method, because to the average curious person he will seem legitimately intelligent. Luckily, it's implementation requires a dedicated and well-read individual to pull off, and is not seen as often as others. Unfortunately, when it does turn up, it is often nearly indistinguishable from a genuine engaged commenter presenting his viewpoint. Because of this, accusing The Professor of Shilling should be a last resort: If you can secure a genuine victory through continued debate, it is much preferred to calling him out.
   
2. The Saboteur: Similar in rhetoric to High-Effort Trolling, but decidedly more sophisticated. The Saboteur will take your side of the argument and blow it so far out of proportion it loses credibility with anybody who isn't already a part of the debate. A classic example is the "missile plane" theory found fairly frequently in 9/11 skeptic circles, i.e. "the planes were cruise missiles mocked up to look like planes." This is of course absurd, as the impacts in no way resemble cruise missile explosions. But it is close enough to the "drone flights" theory (in contrast, a much sounder argument) to be linked in the minds of an uninformed reader, and therefore the former theory reduces the credibility of the latter. This is an easier tactic to combat, but requires long-winded responses that thoroughly deconstruct the issue at hand.
   
3. The Incredulous Bystander: This method of Shilling is the most common of the three. The Shill comes into a debate in progress, and commits the Fallacy of Personal Incredulity ad nauseum. "I'm sorry, I just can't accept that [abc] is [xyz]. It's just impossible, there's no way." This will go on and on. No matter what you throw at him, he will come back with the same incredulity. The purpose is simple: make the poster look like their argument is too fantastical for the average person to agree with. Although it's very easy to defeat The Incredulous Bystander by simple logical arguments, be careful. You have to know when to disengage, or the sheer repetition will make your argument seem desperate. Make a final argument against their disingenuous bafflement early, within three replies if possible. Then disengage completely, even if they come back to try and lead you on some more.
   

Like I said, there are variations on each of these paradigms, and each Shill's methods will be different. More intelligent or better-equipped Shills will use dirty tactics (Vote Manipulation, Multiple Account Shilling, etc.). Sometimes the combined effort of a group of Shills or Shill Accounts can simply be too much to combat alone. In these cases, it's simply best to downvote and disengage. Not every battle can be won.
PART THREE: HOW TO I.D. A TROLL/SHILL ACCOUNT
Thanks to the (fairly) open nature of account creation and tracking on reddit, certain things can be learned about an account from the Account Overview Page. Patterns emerge in every account, regardless of if the account is an active Troll/Shill, or not. It is through the account's activity and past comments that one can glean insight into the intentions of an individual.
A Regular Poster will look something like the account I linked above, which is mine. Post history and comment content may be concentrated to certain subreddits and ideas at times, but will more likely be varied with little recognizable pattern. This is because the individual behind the account doesn't have an agenda beyond personal entertainment (or knowledge acquisition) on the site.
Since Trolling is an activity anybody with a chip on their shoulder can do, not every Troll will be a dedicated Troll Account. Sometimes, people Troll without realizing they're doing it. But there are some hallmarks to look out for: conspicuously high numbers of short, one- or two-sentence responses, a tendency to make every statement a question, abnormal distribution of comments (i.e. the last 50 comments in one thread), and excessive use of casual ridicule when responding to serious comments ("lolwat/get your head checked/wow you're stupid", etc). Additionally, another way to identify part-time Trolls and Flamers is to check their comment history for key subreddits. If somebody shows up and says something questionably racist, derogatory or inflammatory, look for subreddits that might be indicative of that account holder's moral leanings (for example, posts to /whiterights, /greatapes and /ZOG are all good indicators that the poster is racist. Call them out on it!).
A Shill Account will look decidedly different, and might at first glance seem like a normal poster. But there are a couple of key identifiers that can help you form your opinion on the intentions of the account holder:
Karma Authority and Perceived Age: Shills go through accounts like cigarettes. Once a Shill account is identified as such, it is nearly useless for anything except vote manipulation. And reddit's mods (at least, the good ones) have gotten pretty good at identifying accounts that break site rules. This is especially true for /conspiracy and a few related subs. So Shills are often stuck using extremely young accounts with very little commentary added to the site as a whole. These accounts have very little authority with the more skeptical member of the audience smart enough to look at the account history. Seeing zero karma, an age measured in days instead of months, and less than a page of posts doesn't invoke trust in that account's opinion. So Shill accounts will be "aged": The account will be created, one post (or a few) will be made, and that post's karma will be manipulated by the Shill's other accounts, just enough to get the karma up around 150~200. The account will then be left untouched for anywhere between 4 months and a year. Once this period of time is up, the account is brought back to life and the Shill starts posting. Now, the less-thorough reader will see an account that is 7 months old, has 80 link and 225 comment karma, and looks to be active. If they scroll to the bottom of the comment history, they would see that it's a fake set up to look that way, but most people won't. Always check for Perceived Age. If the history goes beyond 20 pages of comments, chances are good the account is legit.
Defense Of The Tyrant: Thanks to the paid nature of their job, the Shill will not advocate reasonable positions. They are specifically here to lessen the impact of questionable material, undermine the opposition to negative aspects of the Status Quo, and make skeptics and activists look bad. The most current example is the rampant Shilling for the Police found in nearly every thread that covers Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Police Brutality or related issues. It is not a popular opinion to defend tyranny, and yet for every post condemning police violence, there is another apologist (or downright authoritarian) comment accusing any protest of undermining the authority of the stewards of public safety. Some of these are regular (if horribly misguided) posters. But it is absolutely an indicator of Shilling, and if you see it combined with other indicators, there is a good chance they were paid to skew the conversation further towards confusion, vitriol, animosity and gridlock.
"Deadly Serious": As has been previously stated, the Shill has a specific goal of making their argument look better than another. In this regard, they will use every tool they have to undermine their opponent. One logical fallacy is commonly used: Appeal to Emotion, AKA The "Deadly Serious" argument. When you appeal to emotion, you are attempting to scare the audience into reactive thinking. "Harassing Police is Deadly Serious" is a good example. You inject the fear of personal safety into the conversation: "What if the cops just quit? Rampant crime! I don't want to have to fear for myself and my children! I don't like it, but this guy has a point." It's a fallacy because emotion is irrational. The reality is there is a problem in this country, and whether or not police will "put up with" protesting is completely unrelated to the actual issue of the creeping authoritarianism plaguing law enforcement throughout America. Again, anybody can Appeal to Emotion accidentally, but if you see it over and over again in the account history, it's most likely deliberate abuse of the fallacy.
PART FOUR: BEST PRACTICES FOR FIGHTING SHILLS
So, you've identified a Shill. You've decided not to put up with it. What do you do?
First of all, keep calm. Engaging in heated debate makes both sides of the argument seem irrational, to your detriment. The Shill doesn't have to look good, he just has to make you look bad, or without that, make the debate so incomprehensibly vitriolic that the audience decides to leave and do something else. By making your case logically, rationally, and without emotional attachment or useless insults, you will come off as logical, rational, informed, and respectable.
Second: Debate the Topic primarily, not the Opposition. Attacks on Authority and Integrity are useful only once Authority and Integrity are in doubt. Until then (or if you are up against The Professor), you are just giving the Shill more ammo to use against you. Stay on topic, don't get lost in semantics and nitpicking, state your case simply. If you do things right, most Shills will give up before you.
Third: Karma is Useless. Ever since reddit changed the voting scheme there has been absolutely no point to tracking Karma as an indicator of winning a conversation or not. Brigading is absolutely a problem whether or not the mods acknowledge it, and chances are good your posts will be net negative, even if you are clearly winning your argument. Don't let it get to you! It's an imaginary number that is easily skewed.
I'm pretty close to character limit at this point, so I figure it's about time to stop this train. Comments, Questions, anything is welcome. This is a rough outline of my own experiences with logic and debate in the treacherous semantic waters we swim in, and is by no means complete. Take these ideas and interpret them, expand on them, make them your own. Then spread it where you can. Any commenter can be a strong debater, if they know the pitfalls and traps that are set for them.
Oh, almost forgot. This post is also an open invitation to any Ex-Shills that want to share their knowledge.
Remember folks, Stay Skeptical.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170912011148/reddit.com/digital_manipulation

Hey folks how ya doing.
Okay, so today we're going to go over tips and tricks to spot agent provocateur tactics, the importance of reviewing post history, and some key rules to remember when engaging with opposing viewpoints of questionable integrity.
First of all, let's differentiate between Trolling and Shilling. A lot of people will say they are the same thing out of ignorance. That's not to say that someone who equates the two is stupid, just uninformed as to the real relation between the terms.
So let's get started.
PART ONE: TROLLS
We'll kick this off with a definition:
Troll (informal): make a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.
Trolling is, at its core, a morally bankrupt activity. Regardless of belief in the content of the message, trying to Troll someone is primarily an attempt to elicit a negative response out of someone else. As such, Trolling comes in many forms, and usually commit a fallacy of some kind.
Some Trolls are more subtle than others. On one end of the spectrum is the Low-Effort Troll, trying to get a rise out of someone purely through Personal Attacks, Imitation-Baiting, Excessive use of Sarcasm/Questioning/Italics, etc. These Trolls are easy to spot.
On the other hand, the High-Effort Troll will incorporate sneakiness: Feigned Agreement, Appeal to Authority and Undermining Tactics. A Troll that starts out agreeing with you will be harder to spot, and often will hook their target deeply into discussion before they realize they are being trolled. A lot of High-Effort Trolling tactics involve the ambiguity of emotional load that comes with conversing entirely through the written word: Always remember that words and sentences can have multiple meanings depending on inflection, and if you are in doubt about the sincerity of a comment, always try speaking it out loud a few times with different levels of implied sarcasm in your voice. If it seems like the argument could turn against you easily, be cautious.
So how do you fight a Troll? It's simple: you don't. The Troll is there specifically to fight. By engaging him, you ensure his victory. Your argument may be airtight, you might bring all the evidence you need to convince any rational person. The Troll doesn't care, he's already made you waste your time and gotten a rise out of you. So remember the cardinal rule of internet discourse: DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
PART TWO: SHILLS
Time for another definition. This one is a little older, and not directly relevant to Shilling on the Internet, but I picked it because it exposes the core deceit at play:
Shill (slang): a confidence trickster's assistant, esp a person who poses as an ordinary customer, gambler, etc, in order to entice others to participate.
The Shill is the guy on the street, beating the Huckster at Three-Card Monty, waving around a stack of twenties that he just won for everybody to see. If Trolling is a morally bankrupt activity, Shilling is moral corruption. The Shill may know they are in the wrong (and likely do), but does not care as long as they make money. As a result, Shilling is a higher art-form than Trolling. While the Troll can skate by on base insults or sarcasm, the Shill must be a seasoned debater, be able to argue a position well, and must have the resources to debunk or otherwise undermine the position of their opponent. If they are a true Shill, they will be all of these things. After all, they are by definition paid for their services.
The most important distinction between a Shill and a Troll is a matter of targeting. Where you, the debater, is the target for a Troll, the Shill is targeting the audience, i.e. the random person who curiously stumbles into the thread and doesn't know what to think about the subject at hand. The Shill isn't paid to enrage the skeptic, he is paid to influence the debate.
The effective Shill will have their own method of undermining an argument, but will generally use one of three methods. They are all effective if executed well, and are all psychological in nature.

1. The Professor: This tactic attempts to present the Shill as the rational, intelligent side of the argument. He will seem to take the moral and logical high ground. His verbosity will only be matched by the scalpel-like precision with which he wields it. He will refer you to mainstream news articles proving his point. This is a very effective method, because to the average curious person he will seem legitimately intelligent. Luckily, it's implementation requires a dedicated and well-read individual to pull off, and is not seen as often as others. Unfortunately, when it does turn up, it is often nearly indistinguishable from a genuine engaged commenter presenting his viewpoint. Because of this, accusing The Professor of Shilling should be a last resort: If you can secure a genuine victory through continued debate, it is much preferred to calling him out.
   
2. The Saboteur: Similar in rhetoric to High-Effort Trolling, but decidedly more sophisticated. The Saboteur will take your side of the argument and blow it so far out of proportion it loses credibility with anybody who isn't already a part of the debate. A classic example is the "missile plane" theory found fairly frequently in 9/11 skeptic circles, i.e. "the planes were cruise missiles mocked up to look like planes." This is of course absurd, as the impacts in no way resemble cruise missile explosions. But it is close enough to the "drone flights" theory (in contrast, a much sounder argument) to be linked in the minds of an uninformed reader, and therefore the former theory reduces the credibility of the latter. This is an easier tactic to combat, but requires long-winded responses that thoroughly deconstruct the issue at hand.
   
3. The Incredulous Bystander: This method of Shilling is the most common of the three. The Shill comes into a debate in progress, and commits the Fallacy of Personal Incredulity ad nauseum. "I'm sorry, I just can't accept that [abc] is [xyz]. It's just impossible, there's no way." This will go on and on. No matter what you throw at him, he will come back with the same incredulity. The purpose is simple: make the poster look like their argument is too fantastical for the average person to agree with. Although it's very easy to defeat The Incredulous Bystander by simple logical arguments, be careful. You have to know when to disengage, or the sheer repetition will make your argument seem desperate. Make a final argument against their disingenuous bafflement early, within three replies if possible. Then disengage completely, even if they come back to try and lead you on some more.
   

Like I said, there are variations on each of these paradigms, and each Shill's methods will be different. More intelligent or better-equipped Shills will use dirty tactics (Vote Manipulation, Multiple Account Shilling, etc.). Sometimes the combined effort of a group of Shills or Shill Accounts can simply be too much to combat alone. In these cases, it's simply best to downvote and disengage. Not every battle can be won.
PART THREE: HOW TO I.D. A TROLL/SHILL ACCOUNT
Thanks to the (fairly) open nature of account creation and tracking on reddit, certain things can be learned about an account from the Account Overview Page. Patterns emerge in every account, regardless of if the account is an active Troll/Shill, or not. It is through the account's activity and past comments that one can glean insight into the intentions of an individual.
A Regular Poster will look something like the account I linked above, which is mine. Post history and comment content may be concentrated to certain subreddits and ideas at times, but will more likely be varied with little recognizable pattern. This is because the individual behind the account doesn't have an agenda beyond personal entertainment (or knowledge acquisition) on the site.
Since Trolling is an activity anybody with a chip on their shoulder can do, not every Troll will be a dedicated Troll Account. Sometimes, people Troll without realizing they're doing it. But there are some hallmarks to look out for: conspicuously high numbers of short, one- or two-sentence responses, a tendency to make every statement a question, abnormal distribution of comments (i.e. the last 50 comments in one thread), and excessive use of casual ridicule when responding to serious comments ("lolwat/get your head checked/wow you're stupid", etc). Additionally, another way to identify part-time Trolls and Flamers is to check their comment history for key subreddits. If somebody shows up and says something questionably racist, derogatory or inflammatory, look for subreddits that might be indicative of that account holder's moral leanings (for example, posts to /whiterights, /greatapes and /ZOG are all good indicators that the poster is racist. Call them out on it!).
A Shill Account will look decidedly different, and might at first glance seem like a normal poster. But there are a couple of key identifiers that can help you form your opinion on the intentions of the account holder:
Karma Authority and Perceived Age: Shills go through accounts like cigarettes. Once a Shill account is identified as such, it is nearly useless for anything except vote manipulation. And reddit's mods (at least, the good ones) have gotten pretty good at identifying accounts that break site rules. This is especially true for /conspiracy and a few related subs. So Shills are often stuck using extremely young accounts with very little commentary added to the site as a whole. These accounts have very little authority with the more skeptical member of the audience smart enough to look at the account history. Seeing zero karma, an age measured in days instead of months, and less than a page of posts doesn't invoke trust in that account's opinion. So Shill accounts will be "aged": The account will be created, one post (or a few) will be made, and that post's karma will be manipulated by the Shill's other accounts, just enough to get the karma up around 150~200. The account will then be left untouched for anywhere between 4 months and a year. Once this period of time is up, the account is brought back to life and the Shill starts posting. Now, the less-thorough reader will see an account that is 7 months old, has 80 link and 225 comment karma, and looks to be active. If they scroll to the bottom of the comment history, they would see that it's a fake set up to look that way, but most people won't. Always check for Perceived Age. If the history goes beyond 20 pages of comments, chances are good the account is legit.
Defense Of The Tyrant: Thanks to the paid nature of their job, the Shill will not advocate reasonable positions. They are specifically here to lessen the impact of questionable material, undermine the opposition to negative aspects of the Status Quo, and make skeptics and activists look bad. The most current example is the rampant Shilling for the Police found in nearly every thread that covers Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Police Brutality or related issues. It is not a popular opinion to defend tyranny, and yet for every post condemning police violence, there is another apologist (or downright authoritarian) comment accusing any protest of undermining the authority of the stewards of public safety. Some of these are regular (if horribly misguided) posters. But it is absolutely an indicator of Shilling, and if you see it combined with other indicators, there is a good chance they were paid to skew the conversation further towards confusion, vitriol, animosity and gridlock.
"Deadly Serious": As has been previously stated, the Shill has a specific goal of making their argument look better than another. In this regard, they will use every tool they have to undermine their opponent. One logical fallacy is commonly used: Appeal to Emotion, AKA The "Deadly Serious" argument. When you appeal to emotion, you are attempting to scare the audience into reactive thinking. "Harassing Police is Deadly Serious" is a good example. You inject the fear of personal safety into the conversation: "What if the cops just quit? Rampant crime! I don't want to have to fear for myself and my children! I don't like it, but this guy has a point." It's a fallacy because emotion is irrational. The reality is there is a problem in this country, and whether or not police will "put up with" protesting is completely unrelated to the actual issue of the creeping authoritarianism plaguing law enforcement throughout America. Again, anybody can Appeal to Emotion accidentally, but if you see it over and over again in the account history, it's most likely deliberate abuse of the fallacy.
PART FOUR: BEST PRACTICES FOR FIGHTING SHILLS
So, you've identified a Shill. You've decided not to put up with it. What do you do?
First of all, keep calm. Engaging in heated debate makes both sides of the argument seem irrational, to your detriment. The Shill doesn't have to look good, he just has to make you look bad, or without that, make the debate so incomprehensibly vitriolic that the audience decides to leave and do something else. By making your case logically, rationally, and without emotional attachment or useless insults, you will come off as logical, rational, informed, and respectable.
Second: Debate the Topic primarily, not the Opposition. Attacks on Authority and Integrity are useful only once Authority and Integrity are in doubt. Until then (or if you are up against The Professor), you are just giving the Shill more ammo to use against you. Stay on topic, don't get lost in semantics and nitpicking, state your case simply. If you do things right, most Shills will give up before you.
Third: Karma is Useless. Ever since reddit changed the voting scheme there has been absolutely no point to tracking Karma as an indicator of winning a conversation or not. Brigading is absolutely a problem whether or not the mods acknowledge it, and chances are good your posts will be net negative, even if you are clearly winning your argument. Don't let it get to you! It's an imaginary number that is easily skewed.
I'm pretty close to character limit at this point, so I figure it's about time to stop this train. Comments, Questions, anything is welcome. This is a rough outline of my own experiences with logic and debate in the treacherous semantic waters we swim in, and is by no means complete. Take these ideas and interpret them, expand on them, make them your own. Then spread it where you can. Any commenter can be a strong debater, if they know the pitfalls and traps that are set for them.
Oh, almost forgot. This post is also an open invitation to any Ex-Shills that want to share their knowledge.
Remember folks, Stay Skeptical.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170912011148/reddit.com/digital_manipulation
https://np.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/87w9ei/top_bully_of_top_minds_goes_delete_after_a_debate

Hey folks how ya doing.
Okay, so today we're going to go over tips and tricks to spot Trolling/Shilling, the importance of reviewing post history, and some key rules to remember when engaging with opposing viewpoints of questionable integrity.
First of all, let's differentiate between Trolling and Shilling. A lot of people will say they are the same thing out of ignorance. That's not to say that someone who equates the two is stupid, just uninformed as to the real relation between the terms.
So let's get started.
PART ONE: TROLLS
We'll kick this off with a definition:

Troll (informal): make a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.

Trolling is, at its core, a morally bankrupt activity. Regardless of belief in the content of the message, trying to Troll someone is primarily an attempt to elicit a negative response out of someone else. As such, Trolling comes in many forms, and usually commit a fallacy of some kind.
Some Trolls are more subtle than others. On one end of the spectrum is the Low-Effort Troll, trying to get a rise out of someone purely through Personal Attacks, Imitation-Baiting, Excessive use of Sarcasm/Questioning/Italics, etc. These Trolls are easy to spot.
On the other hand, the High-Effort Troll will incorporate sneakiness: Feigned Agreement, Appeal to Authority and Undermining Tactics. A Troll that starts out agreeing with you will be harder to spot, and often will hook their target deeply into discussion before they realize they are being trolled. A lot of High-Effort Trolling tactics involve the ambiguity of emotional load that comes with conversing entirely through the written word: Always remember that words and sentences can have multiple meanings depending on inflection, and if you are in doubt about the sincerity of a comment, always try speaking it out loud a few times with different levels of implied sarcasm in your voice. If it seems like the argument could turn against you easily, be cautious.
So how do you fight a Troll? It's simple: you don't. The Troll is there specifically to fight. By engaging him, you ensure his victory. Your argument may be airtight, you might bring all the evidence you need to convince any rational person. The Troll doesn't care, he's already made you waste your time and gotten a rise out of you. So remember the cardinal rule of internet discourse: DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
PART TWO: SHILLS
Time for another definition. This one is a little older, and not directly relevant to Shilling on the Internet, but I picked it because it exposes the core deceit at play:

Shill (slang): a confidence trickster's assistant, esp a person who poses as an ordinary customer, gambler, etc, in order to entice others to participate.

The Shill is the guy on the street, beating the Huckster at Three-Card Monty, waving around a stack of twenties that he just won for everybody to see. If Trolling is a morally bankrupt activity, Shilling is moral corruption. The Shill may know they are in the wrong (and likely do), but does not care as long as they make money. As a result, Shilling is a higher art-form than Trolling. While the Troll can skate by on base insults or sarcasm, the Shill must be a seasoned debater, be able to argue a position well, and must have the resources to debunk or otherwise undermine the position of their opponent. If they are a true Shill, they will be all of these things. After all, they are by definition paid for their services.
The most important distinction between a Shill and a Troll is a matter of targeting. Where you, the debater, is the target for a Troll, the Shill is targeting the audience, i.e. the random person who curiously stumbles into the thread and doesn't know what to think about the subject at hand. The Shill isn't paid to enrage the skeptic, he is paid to influence the debate.
The effective Shill will have their own method of undermining an argument, but will generally use one of three methods. They are all effective if executed well, and are all psychological in nature.

1. The Professor: This tactic attempts to present the Shill as the rational, intelligent side of the argument. He will seem to take the moral and logical high ground. His verbosity will only be matched by the scalpel-like precision with which he wields it. He will refer you to mainstream news articles proving his point. This is a very effective method, because to the average curious person he will seem legitimately intelligent. Luckily, it's implementation requires a dedicated and well-read individual to pull off, and is not seen as often as others. Unfortunately, when it does turn up, it is often nearly indistinguishable from a genuine engaged commenter presenting his viewpoint. Because of this, accusing The Professor of Shilling should be a last resort: If you can secure a genuine victory through continued debate, it is much preferred to calling him out.
   
2. The Saboteur: Similar in rhetoric to High-Effort Trolling, but decidedly more sophisticated. The Saboteur will take your side of the argument and blow it so far out of proportion it loses credibility with anybody who isn't already a part of the debate. A classic example is the "missile plane" theory found fairly frequently in 9/11 skeptic circles, i.e. "the planes were cruise missiles mocked up to look like planes." This is of course absurd, as the impacts in no way resemble cruise missile explosions. But it is close enough to the "drone flights" theory (in contrast, a much sounder argument) to be linked in the minds of an uninformed reader, and therefore the former theory reduces the credibility of the latter. This is an easier tactic to combat, but requires long-winded responses that thoroughly deconstruct the issue at hand.
   
3. The Incredulous Bystander: This method of Shilling is the most common of the three. The Shill comes into a debate in progress, and commits the Fallacy of Personal Incredulity ad nauseum. "I'm sorry, I just can't accept that [abc] is [xyz]. It's just impossible, there's no way." This will go on and on. No matter what you throw at him, he will come back with the same incredulity. The purpose is simple: make the poster look like their argument is too fantastical for the average person to agree with. Although it's very easy to defeat The Incredulous Bystander by simple logical arguments, be careful. You have to know when to disengage, or the sheer repetition will make your argument seem desperate. Make a final argument against their disingenuous bafflement early, within three replies if possible. Then disengage completely, even if they come back to try and lead you on some more.
   

Like I said, there are variations on each of these paradigms, and each Shill's methods will be different. More intelligent or better-equipped Shills will use dirty tactics (Vote Manipulation, Multiple Account Shilling, etc.). Sometimes the combined effort of a group of Shills or Shill Accounts can simply be too much to combat alone. In these cases, it's simply best to downvote and disengage. Not every battle can be won.
PART THREE: HOW TO I.D. A TROLL/SHILL ACCOUNT
Thanks to the (fairly) open nature of account creation and tracking on reddit, certain things can be learned about an account from the Account Overview Page. Patterns emerge in every account, regardless of if the account is an active Troll/Shill, or not. It is through the account's activity and past comments that one can glean insight into the intentions of an individual.
A Regular Poster will look something like the account I linked above, which is mine. Post history and comment content may be concentrated to certain subreddits and ideas at times, but will more likely be varied with little recognizable pattern. This is because the individual behind the account doesn't have an agenda beyond personal entertainment (or knowledge acquisition) on the site.
Since Trolling is an activity anybody with a chip on their shoulder can do, not every Troll will be a dedicated Troll Account. Sometimes, people Troll without realizing they're doing it. But there are some hallmarks to look out for: conspicuously high numbers of short, one- or two-sentence responses, a tendency to make every statement a question, abnormal distribution of comments (i.e. the last 50 comments in one thread), and excessive use of casual ridicule when responding to serious comments ("lolwat/get your head checked/wow you're stupid", etc). Additionally, another way to identify part-time Trolls and Flamers is to check their comment history for key subreddits. If somebody shows up and says something questionably racist, derogatory or inflammatory, look for subreddits that might be indicative of that account holder's moral leanings (for example, posts to /whiterights, /greatapes and /ZOG are all good indicators that the poster is racist. Call them out on it!).
A Shill Account will look decidedly different, and might at first glance seem like a normal poster. But there are a couple of key identifiers that can help you form your opinion on the intentions of the account holder:

• Karma Authority and Perceived Age: Shills go through accounts like cigarettes. Once a Shill account is identified as such, it is nearly useless for anything except vote manipulation. And reddit's mods (at least, the good ones) have gotten pretty good at identifying accounts that break site rules. This is especially true for /conspiracy and a few related subs. So Shills are often stuck using extremely young accounts with very little commentary added to the site as a whole. These accounts have very little authority with the more skeptical member of the audience smart enough to look at the account history. Seeing zero karma, an age measured in days instead of months, and less than a page of posts doesn't invoke trust in that account's opinion. So Shill accounts will be "aged": The account will be created, one post (or a few) will be made, and that post's karma will be manipulated by the Shill's other accounts, just enough to get the karma up around 150~200. The account will then be left untouched for anywhere between 4 months and a year. Once this period of time is up, the account is brought back to life and the Shill starts posting. Now, the less-thorough reader will see an account that is 7 months old, has 80 link and 225 comment karma, and looks to be active. If they scroll to the bottom of the comment history, they would see that it's a fake set up to look that way, but most people won't. Always check for Perceived Age. If the history goes beyond 20 pages of comments, chances are good the account is legit.
  
• Defense Of The Tyrant: Thanks to the paid nature of their job, the Shill will not advocate reasonable positions. They are specifically here to lessen the impact of questionable material, undermine the opposition to negative aspects of the Status Quo, and make skeptics and activists look bad. The most current example is the rampant Shilling for the Police found in nearly every thread that covers Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Police Brutality or related issues. It is not a popular opinion to defend tyranny, and yet for every post condemning police violence, there is another apologist (or downright authoritarian) comment accusing any protest of undermining the authority of the stewards of public safety. Some of these are regular (if horribly misguided) posters. But it is absolutely an indicator of Shilling, and if you see it combined with other indicators, there is a good chance they were paid to skew the conversation further towards confusion, vitriol, animosity and gridlock.
  
• "Deadly Serious": As has been previously stated, the Shill has a specific goal of making their argument look better than another. In this regard, they will use every tool they have to undermine their opponent. One logical fallacy is commonly used: Appeal to Emotion, AKA The "Deadly Serious" argument. When you appeal to emotion, you are attempting to scare the audience into reactive thinking. "Harassing Police is Deadly Serious" is a good example. You inject the fear of personal safety into the conversation: "What if the cops just quit? Rampant crime! I don't want to have to fear for myself and my children! I don't like it, but this guy has a point." It's a fallacy because emotion is irrational. The reality is there is a problem in this country, and whether or not police will "put up with" protesting is completely unrelated to the actual issue of the creeping authoritarianism plaguing law enforcement throughout America. Again, anybody can Appeal to Emotion accidentally, but if you see it over and over again in the account history, it's most likely deliberate abuse of the fallacy.
  

PART FOUR: BEST PRACTICES FOR FIGHTING SHILLS
So, you've identified a Shill. You've decided not to put up with it. What do you do?
First of all, keep calm. Engaging in heated debate makes both sides of the argument seem irrational, to your detriment. The Shill doesn't have to look good, he just has to make you look bad, or without that, make the debate so incomprehensibly vitriolic that the audience decides to leave and do something else. By making your case logically, rationally, and without emotional attachment or useless insults, you will come off as logical, rational, informed, and respectable.
Second: Debate the Topic primarily, not the Opposition. Attacks on Authority and Integrity are useful only once Authority and Integrity are in doubt. Until then (or if you are up against The Professor), you are just giving the Shill more ammo to use against you. Stay on topic, don't get lost in semantics and nitpicking, state your case simply. If you do things right, most Shills will give up before you.
Third: Karma is Useless. Ever since reddit changed the voting scheme there has been absolutely no point to tracking Karma as an indicator of winning a conversation or not. Brigading is absolutely a problem whether or not the mods acknowledge it, and chances are good your posts will be net negative, even if you are clearly winning your argument. Don't let it get to you! It's an imaginary number that is easily skewed.
I'm pretty close to character limit at this point, so I figure it's about time to stop this train. Comments, Questions, anything is welcome. This is a rough outline of my own experiences with logic and debate in the treacherous semantic waters we swim in, and is by no means complete. Take these ideas and interpret them, expand on them, make them your own. Then spread it where you can. Any commenter can be a strong debater, if they know the pitfalls and traps that are set for them.
Oh, almost forgot. This post is also an open invitation to any Ex-Shills that want to share their knowledge.
Remember folks, Stay Skeptical.

The human mind is full of fascinating complexities and contradictions. We know how unlikely a shark attack is, yet we're still afraid to go swimming in the ocean. This is because fear cannot be rationalized. We can't talk ourselves out of fear in its most primal state. Our fear of sharks, and much of our fear in general, comes from our hyper-awareness of our mortality at the hands of the force of nature. It's our fear of being in a situation in which we have no control on the outcome, good or bad.
This has been a tragic year for air travel. Not even counting the Malaysian Air flight 370 that disappeared somewhere in the Eastern Hemisphere in March, a plane has been shot down over war-torn Ukraine, a TransAsia flight has crashed on the runway in Taiwan, an Air Algerie flight has crashed in Mali—and now, an AirAsia flight has disappeared into an unknown and unsettling fate. Bam, bam, bam, bam. It doesn't even seem fathomable that so many air disasters could occur within such a brief amount of time. What happened to air travel being the safest means of transportation? What happened to our planes? What happened to the safety of our skies?
Well, we know the odds haven't changed. Just look at this chart (via New York Times, October 31st, 2007):
.

Risk	Annual Deaths	Lifetime risk
Heart disease	652,486	1 in 5
Cancer	553,888	1 in 7
Stroke	150,074	1 in 24
Hospital infections	99,000	1 in 38
Flu	59,664	1 in 63
Car accidents	44,757	1 in 84
Suicide	31,484	1 in 119
Accidental poisoning	19,456	1 in 193
MRSA (resistant bacteria)	19,000	1 in 197
Falls	17,229	1 in 218
Drowning	3,306	1 in 1,134
Bike accident	762	1 in 4,919
Aispace accident	742	1 in 5,051
Excessive cold	620	1 in 6,045
Sun/heat exposure	273	1 in 13,729
Shark attack	62	1 in 60,453
Lightning	47	1 in 79,746
Train crash	24	1 in 156,169
Fireworks	11	1 in 340,733

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Still, we can be told time and time again that we're many more times likely to die driving to the airport than flying to Philadelphia, yet we might still get that edgy light feeling in our stomach as the plane taxis for take-off, and our minds race through the endless number of ways this flight, and our life, could end, in a chaotic fireball broadcast across the world.
It can be hard to rationalize all of this tragedy. We tend to take these similar disasters and force connections between the dots where there really aren't any. None of these crashes are correlated. They happened, they are tragedies, we need to learn from them to prevent them from happening again, but statistically, they are all equally unlikely to have happened, or to happen again, in the first place. But to see why we might think, or feel otherwise, is to explore two glitches of human psychology: the availability heuristic and the gambler's fallacy.
Let's think back to Jaws, which sparked a massive fear of going in the water. This fear, of course, existed only within people's minds. The movie Jaws had no effect whatsoever on the likelihood of being attacked by a shark. It was simply because it was there, in our minds, so available to be recalled, that we felt it somehow likely to happen to us, somehow more possible. And so we stepped into the waters with vivid images of what lies beneath its surface, waiting for us.
This is an example of the availability heuristic. We are apt to think an event more likely when we can bring to mind examples of its occurrence. After 9/11, booked seats dropped significantly on commercial flights: people had just seen planes flown into buildings, these images replaying in their head, the novel concept of terrorists using commercial airplanes as projectiles: the thought of course occurred, what if it were to happen to them?
And so in the aftermath of witnessing news reports of plane crashes, a shoot-down, and a disappearance all within a few months, and now another disappearance, we can be expected to become nervous fliers. These images are so available for us to call to our heads that we might deduce these rare occurrences could now be more frequent, somehow statistically more likely. Or, rather than rationalize, our fear of plane crashes is now brought to the front of our heads, floating there, difficult to diffuse with reason and numbers. All of the successful flights that take off and land every day don't stick out to us – it's the crashing and burning that we remember.
More than that, though, it's the sudden frequency of plane crashes that can, reasonably, cause some alarm. We're used to hearing about one plane crash a year, maybe, at most. But four or five major air disasters in one year, and at one point, three within two weeks? This is unheard of. It's hard to justify to ourselves such a rare event occurring suddenly so frequently. Somehow, now, it doesn't seem so rare. It seems more likely to happen again.
This, however, is a psychological tendency that has earned the loaded name of the gambler's fallacy. Think of it like this: you walk into Monte Carlo on the Strip in Vegas, a green 21 year old with $100 you're ready to multiply into a college loan repayment. You walk up to a roulette table and watch five rounds before deciding to bet. Every one of these five rounds lands on black. You decide that, since the past five rounds have landed black, the next round must be red, because it seems unlikely there could be six blacks in a row. You may not be convinced there's a correlation, but you have to base your gambling decisions on something, sound logic or not, right? You bet black, it lands red, you lose $50, but you gain a valuable insight into human psychology, and how easily the human brain tricks itself.
With these recent plane crashes, a sort of reverse gambler's fallacy is at play. We may look at the frequent occurrence of these air disasters and suddenly be terrified of flying because we think it's more likely to happen again, this time to us or someone we know and love. So in the wake of air disasters that happen before the previous torn fuselage has had time to cool down, we might urge those we love to take ground transit, or postpone our vacations until plane crashes become less frequent.
What we have to remember in times like these is that the dice aren't loaded. The numbers don't really change. Jaws didn't increase the likelihood of shark attacks on the shores of America's beaches, Psycho didn't increase the likelihood of being murdered, and these recent air tragedies don't increase the chances of your flight dropping out of the sky, for whatever reason. It's just another reminder of the frailty of our logical minds compared to our primal judgments of emotion, and the dominance of fear in guiding our conclusions and decisions in our daily lives.
Next time you get nervous around take-off, remind yourself that you're just a hairless ape jumping to an irrational conclusion, and while you can't turn off your fear, you can remind yourself that it isn't real. Enjoy the miracle of human flight.

Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment. They’re usually studied in psychology and economics, but some of them apply to our everyday life, including testing and playing Magic: the Gathering. In today’s article I’ll talk about 8 cognitive biases, how they’re making you worse at Magic, and what you can do to compensate for them. Some of the time there’s nothing you can do other than simply not acting on the bias, but the mere fact that you’re aware it exists should help you identify when it’s happening.
Keep in mind that this is just an area that interests me, and I am not an authority on the subject in any way. Ultimately this is an article about Magic, not about psychology. All the definitions come from Wikipedia.

1. Peak-End Rule

That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
As humans, we’re great at focusing on one aspect of what happened and letting it define the whole experience, and that aspect is generally either the peak or the end. It’s for this reason, for example, that going 0-2 7-0 feels great, whereas going 7-0 0-2 feels like you might as well drop, even if they are the exact same record.
When you’re testing a matchup, it’s very common for each side to have a widely different perspective. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of, “This matchup is great for me” and “I felt favored” reports from two different sides, which clearly can’t be the case. This happens because we fall prey to the peak-end rule, and it’s something we must correct if we want to have useful results in playtesting.
This happens even more when you’re testing an aggro versus control matchup. The aggro side will have some very easy wins, and it’ll think “wow, I crushed my opponent like there’s no tomorrow—this matchup is so easy.” The control side, however, will have some very complicated wins, and will remember the sweet games in which it was in complete control for half an hour. In the end, both sides will feel like the match is favorable because they are focusing on different things and letting that one moment define their whole experience.
The best way to fix this is to keep track of results. Keeping track will not give you a definitive answer (i.e., it’s not because you went 7-3 that the matchup is 70%), but it will help you identify when you’re being biased—if you think the matchup is favored but results indicate otherwise, then perhaps you should try to playtest more and get a second opinion. It will certainly stop you from thinking that control is favored every time simple because you spend more time winning than you do losing (guilty).

2. Gambler’s Fallacy

The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged.
Most people are familiar with the gambler’s fallacy, but we still fall prey to it from time to time. In MTG, it materializes when we apply past experiences of whether something worked or did not work out to decide whether it’s going to the next time, even if there should, in theory, be no relation.
For example, say that I keep a 1-lander that I believe is correct to keep, and I don’t draw my second land. Then, the following round, I keep a similar 1-lander, and I again don’t get there. By the third round, I’m more likely to mulligan a similar hand, because it’s already failed me twice, even though, if the hand is a good keep, then it’s a good keep regardless.
We also do this a lot with cards drawn by our opponent, by applying either “of course they’re going to have it again, they always have it” or “there’s no way they’re going to have it again,” when those probabilities shouldn’t really change—the fact that your opponent had the perfect card to stop you last game doesn’t influence whether they’re going to have the perfect card to stop you now.
The way to fix this is simply to stop doing it. Yeah, I know, that’s a bit tautological, but there’s no real way around it—you have to be aware of this bias and remove it. When you find yourself arriving at a conclusion based on past experiences that you suspect might be wrong, try to really think it through, and base your decisions on probability rather than those feelings.

3. Illusion of Control

The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.
In Magic, we’re taught that we must always learn from our losses to improve as players. While this is fundamentally true, it creates a culture in which individuals think they’re to blame every single time they lose, which is false. Whenever we lose, we assume we must have done something wrong, and we try to identify what it is. When we can’t, we either fabricate something, or we feel miserable. We do it because we want to think we have more control over the situation than we really do—if we do badly because we messed up, then it follows logically that if we don’t mess up, we’ll do well next time, and that’s comforting because it’s in our hands, and what’s in our hands we can fix.
The harsh reality is that we’re much less in control than we believe. Many of the times we lose, it’s not because we did something wrong—and many of the times we win, it’s not necessarily because we did something right. It’s for this reason that I dislike when I lose and someone asks me, “what happened?” (and my mother is particularly guilty of this) because it implies that for me to have lost, something “weird” had to have happened. Sometimes nothing happened, and you just lost because people lose. In our quest for self-improvement (or perhaps to appear like we’re trying to self-improve), we often create scenarios in which the conclusion is “I did something wrong, therefore I lost” when the conclusion should be “I just lost.”
One of the hardest parts of Magic is making the 55% choice ten times, getting it wrong ten times in a row, and still making the same choice the 11th time, but it’s what you must do—it’s not because a choice didn’t work out that it was wrong. “I should have mulliganed my 2-lander.” No, you shouldn’t have. You played the probabilities and lost. “I shouldn’t have played main-deck Doom Blade.” No, you should have. You were just unlucky to play against the 4 black players in the room.
Magic is a game where people lose all the time, and the sooner you accept that, the happier you will be and the easier you will be able to cope with your losses. The best players have a win percentage of about 65% at the PT level—this means that for every 3 games they play, they lose 1. And those are the best in history! Of course those players are far from perfect, but not even the perfect player would win close to all their matches.
If you want to be a competitive Magic player, you have to try to identify your flaws to improve yourself, absolutely, but you also have to be realistic. You have to accept that sometimes you lose and there is nothing you could have done, or nothing you should have done.

4. Outcome Bias

The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
This is similar to the illusion of control (and in fact there are examples in there that are just outcome bias), but I’ve decided to give them separate entries because I think they usually manifest in different ways. Illusion of control happens when you assume you must’ve done something wrong because you failed, and outcome bias happens when you assume you must’ve done something right because you succeeded. In Magic, this bias is commonly referred to as being “results oriented” (which actually has a different meaning in the outside world).
A while ago, I used to have articles in which I dissected decks that did well at events, and analyzed whether their card choices were improvements over the stock build's. I constantly read comments like “you’re saying X is bad, but how can it be bad if the person won?” The most glaring example was a person who took a 5-color control deck and cut 3 lands for 3 Violent Ultimatums, and then proceeded to win an event. Yes, you read that right. They played 3 fewer lands than the normal build, and 3 more 7-drops that required all specific mana. I said this was something you should never do mathematically, but I saw numerous replies suggesting that I was simply jealous of the person’s success with a different idea, and if he won the event, it was clearly because it worked and I should stop being so close-minded.
Another example of this happened when I wrote about a game in which I activated Depala multiple times, always sending a land I needed to the bottom, and eventually lost whereas if I had drawn a land at any time, I’d have won immediately. I was told by multiple people that perhaps I shouldn’t have used Depala, but clearly I should have as it’s statistically more likely that she helps me than not, even if in practice it did not help me.
In the end, we must understand that the 55% decision is just that—a decision that is going to be right 45% of the time. 45% is a lot. You will, invariably, be “proven right” if you make the wrong decision, but that doesn’t mean it magically becomes the right decision. If you follow a “it worked so it must be right” policy, then it will be much harder for you to improve as a player.

5. Insensitivity to Sample Size

The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
This is also a problem with playtesting. Simply put, we do not do anything enough times to draw powerful statistical conclusions from it. We can have “general ideas” and “educated guesses”, but we must understand that, the smaller our sample size, the larger the variance we expect, and the less “truthful” our results will be. As before, going 7-3 does not mean the matchup is 70%—it could even be unfavorable.
At some point in our testing house, we started to track results from Drafts so that we could see which colors overperformed and underperformed. At first I was against it because I thought we would be putting more weight into this information than we should, so it was better to not have the information at all. The sample size was so small, particularly for some fringe combinations, that it might as well not exist, and we were drawing big conclusions from very small data. Nowadays I think we’ve become a bit better at dealing with this information, so I’m in favor of tracking them again, but only because we know that insensitivity to sample size is a real thing and we account for it.
There are two ways to compensate for this bias. The first is to make your sample size larger (i.e., instead of playing 10 games, play 100 or 1000.) If you go 700-300, then the matchup is likely to be around 70%. In practice, this is usually not feasible, which leads to the second: Don’t playtest to know what happened, but to learn how or why it happened. What happened is an isolated occasion—it might happen differently in the future. If you understand what caused it to happen, though, you can better understand how likely it is to happen again, and you can then extrapolate big conclusions from a relatively small amount of data.

6. Selective Perception

The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
In simple terms, this is the bias where we see what we want to see or what we expect to see, and it’s most common in deck selection where decks start looking better because we created them or because the tournament is imminent.
When we make a deck, we’re hoping that it’ll be great. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be making it. As a result, we focus on the evidence that confirms it’s great, while ignoring the evidence that would make it seem bad. It’s common to read a tournament report that says, “went 4-3, but my 2 losses were due to mistakes. The deck is great,” but there’s often no mention of how many of your 4 wins were due to opposing mistakes, because that doesn’t validate your idea that the deck is good.
It also materializes when we don’t have a deck and the tournament is approaching. In this spot, we’re desperate—we feel awful because we don’t have a deck, and we really want one, so we’re more inclined to accept evidence that tells us a deck is good because this will make us feel better. The best fix for this is, again, to just be aware of it and try to compensate.
Last week I wrote about our G/W Tokens deck and how I decided to not play it because I thought people were being victims of selective perception—we had no deck and the tournament was the following day, so we ignored all of G/W’s flaws and focused on its good points, which made it seem appealing to everybody. By choosing not to play it, I was trying to compensate for our selection bias because I knew it existed.
Of course, in this example I crashed and burned, as the deck turned out to be amazing, but I do not think my train of thought was wrong. I knew we were looking at everything with rose-colored glasses and I compensated for that, and the fact that once our glasses were off, reality turned out to actually be pink, doesn’t mean we didn’t have them to begin with.

7. Availability Cascade

A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
In Magic, it’s hard for us to test everything by ourselves. Thankfully, we don’t have to, as the internet provides us with a sort of “collective brain” full of information that other people have acquired. The problem emerges when the original information is incorrect and ends up spreading more and more, with each new person simply repeating the original information and by doing that validating it and making it even harder to challenge.
Something like this happened when we were testing for PT Milwaukee. The deck I liked, g with the Battle Rage/Become Immense combo, was supposed to have problems with G/W. It made sense—G/W is usually good versus red decks because your creatures are bigger and you have some life gain. But, most importantly, everyone everywhere said that the matchup was good for G/W—it was just common knowledge.
Except that it wasn’t right. In fact, the match was pretty good for the red deck, pre- and post-board. It only took us a couple games to figure it out, but then we tested more and more because we wanted to make sure. But that didn’t make any sense. Everyone said the matchup was good for G/W. Every player I talked to, and every article. Were they all wrong? Were we wrong?
The answer to this is probably that at some point someone was wrong, and then misinformation spread. A lot of the people who said G/W beat red hadn’t actually played the matchup. They were just repeating what other people said. Some of those had played the matchup, and concluded that red was better, but faced with overwhelming odds, they conceded that they were probably wrong and the matchup was actually good for G/W. So you end up having a scenario where, say, of 10 people to give you an answer, the first 3 think G/W wins, and the next 7 either think red wins or have no opinion, but all 10 will end up telling you that G/W wins because that’s the accepted consensus.
The way to compensate for this is to know that people can be wrong, that something is not necessarily true because it’s common knowledge, and that you are able to challenge it. You can’t doubt popular wisdom every single time of course, but knowing this phenomenon exists is important because it tells you that when your findings go against common knowledge, you aren’t necessarily going against hundreds of players . You might be going against just one or two that happened to be the first ones.
Patrick Chapin actually wrote an article about this a long time ago, and it’s one of my all-time favorites.

8. Pro-Innovation Bias

The tendency to have an excessive optimism toward an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Another deck building bias, and one we see all the time in spoiler season, where we think everything is broken and believe that because something is new, it must be an improvement over something that already exists. I can cite Oath of Ajani as an example, where people said turn-2 Oath of Ajani into turn-3 Gideon into turn-4 Nissa was a new possible “nut draw in Standard” while forgetting that you could already do that with a number of mana creatures.
This bias is tough to balance in Magic because if something is an improvement, we want to be the first ones to find it. As a result, we want to push the best-case scenario for every new card and if it’s good enough, we see if its flaws can be mitigated. The important thing is that you don’t skip the “flaws” part. You should be positive at first, but you cannot ignore its limitations and weaknesses forever.

'''
So, there's a sense in which learning anything is valuable, sure. But the alternative isn't "learn nothing", but give up other skills that you could be learning. And I think that generally-speaking, the impact of taking away most things that we are teaching people is worse.
My high school world history class (which really was Africa->Fertile Crescent->Greece->Italy->medieval Europe (Germany and west of that)->American colonies->United States->American Civil War->US Asia involvement->World War I/II->civil rights movement/Vietnam) took a semester. That leaves a lot of the world uncovered at a lot of different times. So, we could double that, put another semester into it. Pick something of central or east Asia, Africa-after-people-left-caves, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, etc to cover.
When I took a geometry class in middle school, it was also a semester, so a comparable amount of class time. We could probably eliminate geometry from the curriculum and instead teach more world history. But...is it worth eliminating geometry knowledge? My take is that it probably isn't a worthwhile tradeoff.
This isn't to denigrate history. I've probably spent more time covering history on my own than anything other than possibly computer-science-related topics. I like it. But I just don't see it as a skill bottleneck on the general population preventing society from being massively better-off.
Saying that it gives you a broader world view, helps you understand things better, gives you context...all that's true. But it's also been true of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics...darn near everything that I've spent time reading about. I think that "learning things helps you understand other things" is probably broadly-true of most things.
If I had to choose two items that I'd prefer to make part of what's generally-taught, I'd probably do the following:

• Eliminate the literature portion of English classes. I'd sacrifice letting people quote Shakespeare and so forth, and being able to understand old written works in English well. Nice, but I've been pretty convinced by a linguistics lecturer pointing out that much of learning Shakespeare or Chaucer is just teaching people a dead language that they are extremely unlikely to use anywhere else.
  
• Cut calculus, or at least most of it. While calculus is critical for certain fields, I had three calculus classes, and a large portion of them dealt with hammering techniques of hand-integrating symbolic equations into people's heads. And nobody does that: if you do symbolic integrations professionally, you're going to break out [Mathematica]¹ or another symbolic math software package. It's like teaching people now-obsolete rapid mental arithmetic techniques when everyone's carrying a smartphone with a calculator. My phone has [maxima]² ) on it: my brain will never be able to compete with that.
  

What would I spent the time on?

• A class that covers propaganda/marketing techniques. I had a speech class, and part of it was devoted to rhetoric and techniques of influencing people (e.g. [bandwagon effect]³ ). I had a psychology class that covered other psychological quirks. I had a philosophy class that dealt with things like [non-transitive preference]⁴ #Strict_versus_weak) and [time preference]⁵ . I read through a bunch of cognitive science material, and picked up things like the high impact of [variable schedule payoffs in conditioning]⁶ . That stuff is scattered through all sorts of different classes today. It's not combined into one "this is how people are going to try to get you to do or believe things" course.
  
• A class that covers statistics. At least where I went to school, this was not part of the standard curriculum. However, I think that it's important in many more fields than the math classes that were available (especially in the social sciences), and to understand the basic importance of cited numbers and graphs.
  

Why?
I hear a lot of people talking about the importance of "critical thinking". That is, not to simply blindly accept things handed you, but to be able to analyze them. And I've been thinking over why people don't do so when they don't.
I don't think that people lack for cynicism or suspicion. You can hit up /conspiracy and find all kinds of people who are hell-bent on putting insane effort into finding alternative explanations for anything.
I do think that most people have a basic disparity in knowledge of how people try to influence others. They aren't dumb -- by historical standards, society today is damn urbane and knowledgeable. But they aren't familiar with how a marketer or an advertiser or a salesman or a politician might try to convince them to do something. And that creates a big disparity between the influencer and the influencee.
If you have a market (or, for that matter, a democracy), you basically expect people to act rationally, and to act in their interests. That's a core part of how we expect the world to work today, and a core part of the role that people play in it. But we do very little to try to render them able to ignore efforts to make them act in a different manner.
For statistics...I think that people have adopted the idea of "science being right". They may or may not understand the processes involved, but they more-or-less buy into the idea that we should to value it. And so it's very common for our media to cite numbers and statistics in support of something: modern society is suffused in them. Great!
The problem is that they often don't have enough of a handle to identify mis-use -- intentional or unintentional -- of those statistics, or to understand the implications of a statistic. I see being able to evaluate and understand the implications of statistics as a basic skill for a society that uses them all the time.
This forum is probably pretty knowledgeable compared to the general population. But things like understanding [sampling]⁷ ) or what [confidence]⁸ really means seem to often escape a lot of people here. Those clearly have relevance to a lot of people out there, whereas many of the things that I my fellow students took classes in -- geometry, trigonometry, calculus -- seem to have rather less-frequent application.
And even beyond that, counteracting things like the [gambler's fallacy]⁹ in the general population seems like it would be handy.
'''
Context Link
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Author: vokegaf
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_\(software\ 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_\(economics\ 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning#Gambling_.E2.80.93_variable_ratio_scheduling 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_\(statistics\ 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Consider this will be in the same sitting as Part 9 I have nothing of substance or merit to say in the intro.

• Illusion of control

The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events; for example, it occurs when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence.It is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal. Along with illusory superiority and optimism bias, the illusion of control is one of the positive illusions.
Positive illusions are unrealistically favorable attitudes that people have towards themselves or to people that are close to them. Positive illusions are a form of self-deception or self-enhancement that feel good, maintain self-esteem or stave off discomfort at least in the short term.
The Illusion of control can be associated with conceited personalities. If you notice someone discuss events or anecdotes that they were not involved in or were merely in the presence of it when it occurred as "we" rather than naming a specific individual in some cases this may be not intentionally disingenuous but an actual held belief. National accomplishments, personal preference sport teams or even online communities, you may hear someone referring to when one sports team beats another as "we kicked ass last night" or someone who frequents 4chan but no a specific raid as saying "yeah, we totally screwed with that poll" combined with Choice-supportive bias and Illusory truth effect after time even if they were originally disingenuous they can come to believe their version of events.
At times, people attempt to gain control by transferring responsibility to more capable or “luckier” others to act for them. By forfeiting direct control, it is perceived to be a valid way of maximizing outcomes. This illusion of control by proxy is a significant theoretical extension of the traditional illusion of control model. Rather than contest someone for a position of authority, say a promotion or an elected position due to the Ambiguity effect, someone who wants the position might not go for it and instead convince them selves that they are "letting" someone else go for it because they will either do better or carry out the persons intentions anyway and the person can avoid responsibility and work.
This can be exploited much the same way as the IKEA effect. By feeding into some ones illusion of control you can allow them to get complacent and socially and emotionally invested in the outcome of a project. so much so that they may even take full responsibility of it if and when it goes pear shaped. Due to them having re-written their own perception of reality and history due to the illusory truth they will honestly believe and be fully convinced that any possible mistakes or actions were and are their responsibility.
This is especially true of people with large egos, including social engineers who themselves have a strong sense of control of the people around them. I have seen a few amateur social engineers and hackers fully accept and believe that they are wholly responsible for a series of illegal events when they were merely a scape goat. However after a certain point they have convinced themselves that they are fully responsible and trying to remove them from that position can result in the back fire effect. When more often than not police want to close cases and everyone involved is in agreement, there is not enough interest in the truth for it ever to make it to the light of day.
I'll cover this again in social psychology. But its always important to know that memories don't remember incidents, but rather the last time you remember an incident. that means Opinions, cognitive biases can re-write a memory each time it is recalled, the events re-written. If you control the cognitive biases, use attentional bias to bring up events over and over, you can re-write some ones memories, This is why I made a post about the dark triad because the same can happen to you and it would be negative. memories and perceptions of such effect some ones personality so given enough time, you can actually change some ones entire personality you can even change your own personality, intentionally for the positive.
After explaining a lot about social engineering to someone, after I explained how it is possible to indirectly convince someone to do something through proxies I hinted at but avoided specifically spelling it out, that I was responsible for making them do something that they did, before I met them, simply as a proof of theory. After a time, about a month, they became fully accepting that I had in fact made them do something indirectly, with out their knowing.
Citations regarding my statement on the operation of memory...

1. citation
   
2. citation .pdf
   

• Illusory correlation

Illusory correlation is the phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables (typically people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists. A common example of this phenomenon would be when people form false associations between membership in a statistical minority group and rare (typically negative) behaviors as variables that are novel or salient tend to capture the attention. This is one way stereotypes form and endure. Hamilton & Rose found that stereotypes can lead people to expect certain groups and traits to fit together, and then to overestimate the frequency with which these correlations actually occur.
Thanks to Attentional bias, Availability heuristic and Confirmation bias racism or even just stereotyping can be self reinforcing. The obvious truth is that correlation does not denote causation. This can be used both aggressively and defensively whether you want to confirm someone of an opinion or dissuade them from it.
The other thing is that Though correlation does not denote causation, it doesn't disprove it either. Though, the phrase "correlation does not denote causation" can be used as a thought terminating Cliché which is something I still have to go over I thought I'd bring attention to it. a converse Thought terminating Cliché is "well its the exception that proves the rule"... Personally I think that phrase is a fucking joke and makes no sense, I can't help but find it hilarious how many people just accept what is being said when its said because of that phrase. I think for the most part the "proves the rule" part is an acceptance of someone else opinion so some see it as a cognitive compromise. an "I'll accept this defeat here and now if you accept my opinion on the whole" its a phrase that actually got me to ask about thought terminating Clichés, because its so common, so unquestioned and makes so little sense, yet seems to be taken fully for granted.
Like many of these cognitive biases, simply pointing them out can undermine some ones point of view and you can then accuse them of being unreasonable and irrational. equally if the needs be you can encourage them and allow them to flourish with in some ones perspective.

• Impact bias

The impact bias, a form of which is the durability bias, in affective forecasting, is the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.
A mix of Empathy gap and the Ambiguity effect , When predicting how an experience will impact us emotionally, events which have not been experienced are particularly difficult. Also often when making a prediction of the impact of an event people focus solely on the event in question. This ignores the fact that with the passage of time, other events will occur that influence happiness.
On its own this bias is not very substantial but it can be used in conjunction with other cognitive biases like the Illusion of control, Gambler's fallacy or the ambiguity effect. in that people will be unlikely to accurately understand the emotional effect of the result of their actions. In conjunction with the Hyperbolic discounting it can be dangerous as it will allow people to rationalize a emotionally dangerous satisfying short term action over the long term implications....like cheating on a partner. In the wrong hands, it could be exploited to encourage such and action, then exploiting the ambiguity effect someone could then be exposed to extortion. such as a honeypot scam

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_HUMINT_asset_recruiting#Love.2C_honeypots.2C_and_recruitment

As per use by espionage agencies.

• Information bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_bias_(psychology)

Information bias is a type of cognitive bias, and involves e.g. distorted evaluation of information. An example of information bias is believing that the more information that can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that extra information is irrelevant for the decision.
We see this a lot with anecdotal evidence where a person thinks quantity is more important than quality. As well as encouraging, discouraging and making note and undermining this bias to what ever your ends might be. The bias itself can be used to busy and distract someone citing the thought terminating Cliché "better have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it" as an excuse to sanction results.
Conversely and even used in legal defense, where by the opposition has to go through submitted information to form counter points in advance, you can present someone with a needle in a haystack, haystack included. If anyone suggests that someone you might be overdoing it, you can cite "better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it...