Earlier today I lost a match at Prismata, a turn-based strategy game without RNG. When I analyzed the game, I discovered that changing one particular decision I had made on one turn from A to B caused me to win comfortably. A and B had seemed very close to me at the time, and even after knowing for a fact that B was far superior, it wasn’t intuitive why.
Then I listed the main results from A and B, valued those by intuition, and immediately B looked way better.
One can model these problems on a bunch of different levels, where going from level n to n+1 means hiding the details of level n and approximating their results in a cruder way. On level 1, one would compare the two subtrees whose roots are decisions A and B (this should work just like in chess). Level 2 would be looking at exact resource and attack numbers in subsequent turns. Level 3 would be categorizing the main differences of A and B and giving them intuitive values, and level 4 deciding between A and B directly. What my mistake showcases is that, even in a context where I am quite skilled and which has limited complexity, applying intuition at level 4 instead of 3 lead to a catastrophic error.
If you can’t go lower, fine. But there are countless cases of people using intuition on a level that’s unnecessarily high. Hence if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with made-up numbers. That is just one example of where applying intuition one level further down: “what quantity of damage arises from this” rather than “how bad is it” can make a big difference. On questions of medium importance, briefly asking yourself “is there any point where I apply intuition on a level that’s higher than necessary” seems like a worthy exercise.
Meta: I write this in the spirit of valuing obvious advice, and the suspicion that this error is still made fairly often.
Intuition should be applied at the lowest possible level
Earlier today I lost a match at Prismata, a turn-based strategy game without RNG. When I analyzed the game, I discovered that changing one particular decision I had made on one turn from A to B caused me to win comfortably. A and B had seemed very close to me at the time, and even after knowing for a fact that B was far superior, it wasn’t intuitive why.
Then I listed the main results from A and B, valued those by intuition, and immediately B looked way better.
One can model these problems on a bunch of different levels, where going from level n to n+1 means hiding the details of level n and approximating their results in a cruder way. On level 1, one would compare the two subtrees whose roots are decisions A and B (this should work just like in chess). Level 2 would be looking at exact resource and attack numbers in subsequent turns. Level 3 would be categorizing the main differences of A and B and giving them intuitive values, and level 4 deciding between A and B directly. What my mistake showcases is that, even in a context where I am quite skilled and which has limited complexity, applying intuition at level 4 instead of 3 lead to a catastrophic error.
If you can’t go lower, fine. But there are countless cases of people using intuition on a level that’s unnecessarily high. Hence if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with made-up numbers. That is just one example of where applying intuition one level further down: “what quantity of damage arises from this” rather than “how bad is it” can make a big difference. On questions of medium importance, briefly asking yourself “is there any point where I apply intuition on a level that’s higher than necessary” seems like a worthy exercise.
Meta: I write this in the spirit of valuing obvious advice, and the suspicion that this error is still made fairly often.