Notes on the need to lose
Context: An old, rambling set of notes on “stuck in the middle with bruce” by John R Fizzo. Fantastic article BTW.
People have a strong need to lose in various situations. For example: you see them say ‘oh, I just got unlucky’ when they play a game of Magic and don’t get dealt quite the right cards in some turn. They are justifying losing, making it OK, coming up with an excuse that they will then use later on when they meet another such situation: ‘oh, I have got bad cards. There’s no way I can win. Losing is OK’. Then they lose. Or when people are playing games and handicap themselves even when they know that they can’t possibly win, or trying to prove things that they know they can’t possibly prove for no real reason. They are creating scenarios where they will lose, and they know it subconsciously. This is pervasive, and I guess it feels pretty common to me.
This really feels similar to Zvi’s stuff on conformity and people burning utility because it removes any ambiguity that they actually want to win or that they want the rewards or what have you.
Maybe motive ambiguity can be viewed as level three people not wanting to be viewed as level one people. The problem is, how exactly would they go about and show that their motives are not ambiguous? Like if the rallying flag is ‘there’s a lion over there’ then if you actually try to see if there is a lion over there, AND YOU CARE ABOUT LIONS BEING OVER THERE, then you don’t say that there isn’t one, because otherwise you’d show your motives are unambiguously about lion’s being there and not about being in the group.
John seems to be saying that we have these ingrained responses about losing being fine, about ‘wanting to lose’ about discarding the need to win.
I am not sure about this. Maybe it is more like we have things we want, but society trains us not to get them. OK, that interpretation is way more Vassar than Hanson, I think. Hanson’s might be that we don’t actually want to win the things we claim to want. Or perhaps that our ‘need to lose’ is just a need to win something else so strong that we maximise it rather than our conscious desires.
On the ‘wanting other things’ interpretation: you are playing the game not to win, but to do X. When you find yourself in a situation where X is no longer possible, but you can still win, you play to lose so you can stop wasting your time not maximising X. Perhaps X might be ‘I’m a smart person, or a determined person or a kind person’ and you encounter a, perhaps socially, acceptable reason for such a person to give up. Then you give up, because you have successfully acted as if X were true, perhaps socially true.
I think the generalisation of this is that you’ve got some proxy for X that part of you is optimising for, one which attempts to conceal itself as X and screws up your epistemics because if it doesn’t, it will lose to the part of you that does care about X.
This need to lose can appear in hundreds, or even thousands, of situations throughout a single day.
John seems to be claiming that he has listened to his ‘need to lose’ and written many articles, and has been praised for it. So I guess that’s an example of people loving motive ambiguity?
In the end, I don’t know what to make of this. All I know is that I’m stuck in the middle with Bruce.
Another oft-cited post on the subject is Sirlin’s “Introducing...the Scrub”. This one comes from the context of fighting games. A scrub is a player who is consistently defeated by moves that he (the scrub) rejects as “cheap” or “boring”. The scrub loses because he has handicapped himself by forgoing certain winning moves; whether by not learning them, or by not executing them when given the chance.
I think this really points at different motivations, though. Sometimes a person finds themselves playing a competitive game when really they just want to be playing a game as an activity. They’re looking for recreation or imagination, not competition: they’re playing catch or playing pretend, not playing pro sports.
The designers of Magic describe three different “player psychographics”, only one of which (“Spike”) is about playing to win. They know that the audience for their game includes a lot of people who are not there to be maximally competitive. The other sorts of players are not going to win tournaments against the Spikes, but they’re going to have a good time playing on the kitchen table.
It’s okay for the game makers and players to have different maps of the player base, though. For the makers of a commercial game, it would be bad business sense to build only for Spikes, because they can sell more product if non-Spikes have a good time too. But for a competitive player who’s striving to improve, there’s some reason to label some other players as “scrubs” — because defeating them doesn’t teach you much.
Oh gosh, how irksome if Magic neurotypes its players like that.
Sirlin writes only of denial of one’s weakness, not of a “need to lose”.
I think I’m missing a bunch of context here, and I can’t tell if you’re arguing against something or if you’re agreeing with it. Taking it at face value, I think this is just factually incorrect for many people, in addition to being awash in typical mind fallacy.
I’m a gamer. I’ve played a lot of professional-level poker (I never made a full living from it, but many of my close associates did and do), I’ve studied to high-amateur level many forms of board, card, and classic games (the full cube of two/multiplayer, hidden/open information, random/deterministic).
Losing is part of the world. Anyone serious (or unserious but experienced) understands this. Recognizing the chance of winning, recognizing the different tactics that can maximize your payoff even if winning is unlikely, and accepting that you’ll often lose a game or subgame is CRITICAL to overall winning. Anyone who denies this is likely to be unpleasant, and probably wins less than they could.
Understanding one’s handicaps is NOT a need to lose. Justifying and accepting a loss is NOT a need to lose.
In poker, folding early is one of the primary differences between an overall winner and an overall loser. Someone who tries to win every hand goes broke extremely quickly. In many other games, one should be conservative when ahead (protect the lead) and take crazy risks when behind (high-variance “hail mary” plays, if the cost of a loss doesn’t get any worse and it increases the chance of winning).
For non-money games, there’s ALSO the metagames of wanting people around me to have fun. I unabashedly don’t play only to win. And THAT is not “needing to lose”, it’s still trying to find ways to win, just recognizing that I can still get almost as much fun, perhaps get MORE strategic practice and domain learning, in losing as I do in winning.
Nah, this is definitely a thing. I’m often scared to try winning because I fear my best efforts will not be good enough. Like, I’m effectively following the adage “better not to risk failure than to act and remove all doubt”. Well, some of the time. So when I read about the need to lose, or your “inner Bruce”, in Stuck In The Middle With Bruce, it resonated with me.
And yeah, that’s obviously not what good gamers do. But what made you think I’m talking about good gamers? Or even about most people?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that it’s universal in either direction. You’re absolutely right that this urge to avoid trying because it’d make failing feel a bit worse is common as well.
It does vary a LOT among groups and situations—some will be dispassionate strategists in money issues, but emotionally-risk-averse in (some) relationships. Many will play a game or games enough to learn some of the lessons about meta-outcomes, and a few will apply that to other areas.
It didn’t resonate with me, though I recognize some of the behaviors in others. I recognize just how thick the wall of my bubble is, though, so I really don’t want to imply universality. I do recommend my approach, though. Losing is part of playing, and shouldn’t affect one’s ego in either direction. The puzzle of how to maximize the overall outcome of the sequence of games in life remains fascinating and worth pursuing.
Your approach is clearly good. But the trouble is, how do I deal with Bruce?
It seems easy to deal with Bruce. Take the seat to his left. Do your best to help him enjoy giving you +EV opportunities.
More seriously, I didn’t engage deeply with the linked post, more about the text on LW. the link had enough blanket statements and far-mode stories that I didn’t think there was much information for me. What, specifically, is your difficulty? If it’s that “many people spew money because of emotional disregulation or bad epistemology”, you mostly have to decide whether and how you can help them, and how you can catch some of the spew when you can’t help. This itself is a game that you may or may not be able to win, and deciding your goals and how to pursue them is key.
I should admit that one of the reasons I play less poker nowadays is that I find I don’t enjoy the company of the people who make it profitable. I do enjoy those who make it unprofitable, by thinking about the game and talking intelligently about life. The goals of winning and of optimizing my social interaction are at odds, so I do something else.
It’s been said and written many times—the important skill in poker is game selection: find the softest field, and exploit it. As said long long ago on rec.gambling.poker: “to succeed in life, surround yourself with people smarter than you. to succeed in poker, surround yourself with people dumber than you.”
Nailing down what’s wrong specifically is part of my issue.
Ah, your inner Bruce. I do sympathize, though I’m not sure I have great advice, other than self-awareness and noticing when it happens. “Akrasia” doesn’t get discussed around here as much as it used to, and it was never particularly rigorous discussion, but it may be worth looking for some older posts and sequences. https://www.lesswrong.com/w/akrasia
Related: Trying to Try
. . . Wow, if that Rizzo piece is representative of how channer bicamerals were handling their internal conflicts before Ziz, I understand Ziz a little better.
Isn’t losing just what you need to do to increase your ability to win? Other than the elements of what Rizzo writes about that are obviously just the activation of simian instincts to end a conflict by submitting, that is [ which is a lot of it ].