Vintage and Authoritarianism

[Smmenen]

I understand that you're a lawyer, but your behavior here is unacceptable. You're prioritizing "winning" this discussion over any reasonable attempt to aid in optimizing the suitability of this site's culture for any purpose.

Ad hominem's aside, that's simply not true.

I just think that your original post is confusing authoritarianism with a general attitude of dismissiveness.  While those aren't mutually exclusive, I am asserting that you are confusing them. 

This also does not have to do with this site's culture, but magic culture.  Go to any Magic website in the history of the game.  Go read the ancient USENET archives here: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.trading-cards.magic.strategy/about 

You're also attacking the wrong person.   While there are many people on this site who have attacked you in private, I am not one of them (at least to my memory).  I do find your style of writing difficult to parse, and think that most people can't understand it.  You leave most of your points implicit, and that make lead to frustration on the part of some readers (myself included) who attempt to decode your posts.

Case in point, one of your last posts:

Good: suitable for the purpose of winning tourneys.
Good: suitable for the purpose of determining the likelihood of a given deck winning a tourney.

Looking at first place finishes only and "dismissing" first place finishes that don't fit your world view is less suitable than analyzing entire top8s without bias.

I think the average person probably won't understand your message here.   Communication requires the sender to be clear so that the receiver understands the message.

Translating your post into English or a more explicated post might look like this:

There is a distinction between defining good as "suitable for the purpose of winning touraments" and defining it as "suitable for the purpose of determiming the liklihood of a given deck winning a tournament."  I define good as the latter, because (and then explain why).

Looking at first places finishes alone is extremely results oriented and ignores critical information, including matchups, luck, etc that naturally play out in a tournament.  It would be better to examine a host of results and look for consistent performance over top 8s rather than the inherently flawed view of looking solely at a tournament winner.

Do you see the difference?  Your posts are often cryptic, vague, and full of missing words and information. 

I think the OP actually illustrates this quite nicely.  I don't even know what this line means: "Inherency An authoritarian perceives value as intrinsic and not situation."

At this point were are going in circles, but the bottom line is that you are mistaking and confusing dismissiveness and the disputes that arise naturally in free discourse for its opposite. 

[The Atog Lord]

Tournament performance is the only thing Magic players care about.  It is the *only* definition of good.

Indeed.

[LemonLyman]

I don't understand what the issue is over being dismissed and having ideas labeled as terrible in an internet forum.

Do you think for a second if Rich Shay and his team had posted Vintage Jund, complete with Bloodbraid Elf into Moxes, many people would've taken him seriously? "Better chance with the Jace v. Chandra deck" I heard about this deck and literally laughed out loud. 

But Ryan Glackin made the finals with it and I considered picking it up.

Somebody right now is having an idea you dismiss, and somebody is dismissing your idea.  We play the games to decide who's right.

[AmbivalentDuck]

Dropping any attempt to make this readable to someone without some sort of postgraduate education...

Epistemology gets broken down differently by the various experts but everyone agrees roughly on the following progression:
"Knowledge is first-hand experience"
"Knowledge comes from authority"
"Knowledge is subjective"
"Knowledge is suitable for a purpose"
"Knowledge is inseparable from the knower due to uncertain observation"

Anything beyond those gets contentious and doesn't contribute to our discussion.

So, we use that progression to talk about our knowledge of the goodness of a MtG deck:
"I beat my friend with it yesterday."
"Mike Flores says it really good."
"It doesn't always put up results. Deck X is more fun, I'll play that instead."
"The expected suitability/value against the field is ______."
"While the ____ method is best for computing expected value from our limited sample, it's not sufficient to draw a strong conclusion."

You're advocating trusted second-hand experience (knowledge from authority) over statistical methods even though those methods are demonstrably ideal for their purpose.

I think the average person probably won't understand your message here. Communication requires the sender to be clear so that the receiver understands the message.

That's precisely the "attack" you addressed. Epistemologies are not downward-compatible. By caring that the average person can read your post and be inclined to agree with it, you're abandoning the rich frameworks that they lack and cannot be given quickly. While that behavior is perfectly defensible in a courtroom, it's indefensible to pretend that second-hand knowing compares or even can compare positively to one of the optimal cue combination approaches in a discussion of the nastiness that arises in cultures that promote second-hand knowing.

[Cody.TopDeckInsurrection]

I dont understand the purpose of this thread.
1. no one wants to listen to you whine about how you beat 5 year olds on cockatrice but cant get respect because you dont play in tournaments. You talked about how people arent willing to invest into vintage and then you posted about how you dont get respect and how you wont invest money into new decks that have worked on cockatrice.....
2. you will not beat steve in an arugment. give up man

[hitman]

His point is simple although pointless. He thinks he has a great deal of insight to contribute with higher reasoning than most on TMD can understand. It's possible that he's right but utterly pointless in communicating. The point of a communication is to convey a thought that the recipient will understand.

Dropping any attempt to make this readable to someone without some sort of postgraduate education...

He's unwilling or unable to describe his thought process to someone without "some sort of post-graduate education."  This is why no one gives him respect. He's always condescending and unable to explain himself so no one wants to give him the time of day. He's obviously tooting his own horn and frustrated because people don't acknowledge his "obvious" intellectual superiority. A truth uncommunicateable is worthless no matter how much you think of yourself.

[AmbivalentDuck]

A truth uncommunicateable is worthless no matter how much you think of yourself.

Addressing this as briefly as possible, it takes most people a PhD in physics to understand the math that underlies successful high frequency trading. This is the clearest example I can present where an idea is impossible to communicate in layman's terms but extremely profitable and worthwhile. The value of the idea is its fitness for making money.

[Grand Inquisitor]

This thread is more interesting if we don't focus on personalities.  I think the useful insights are more closely clustered around:

(1) Clarification of AD's complaints
(2) Shift from debating whether AD's complaints are true to seeing what solutions/recommendations he or others have to offer
(3) If not consensus of AD's experience, consensus on common problems of cynical forum behavior

it takes most people a PhD in physics to understand

...so that's an unreasonable expectation for your discussion here.  You can describe the gap, but I don't think that's a productive use of your time.  Either educate to close the gap, or move on.

[Meddling Mike]

Tournament performance is the only thing Magic players care about.  It is the *only* definition of good.

I don't know that this is always the case. I can think of scenarios where decks have been considered good that have not yet put up any tournament results to validate that position. When Lodestone Golem was spoiled I immediately pushed 13 Sphere Workshop Aggro to tier 1 in my mind without a single tournament result to back it up. I can recall a similar scenario about combo when Grim Tutor and Imperial Seal were made vintage legal.

Looking at first place finishes only and "dismissing" first place finishes that don't fit your world view is less suitable than analyzing entire top8s without bias.

I think it's important to be able to apply bias to results that one receives when attempting to apply anything I learned from that situation to a situation that is more relevant to me. Tournament results aren't an identical set of independent experiments and shouldn't be treated as such when weighing their value. When trying to determine the value of tournament data so many factors come into play. How many people attended this tourney?  How skilled were the players? What was the metagame like? How recent are these results and how has the metagame shifted since that time? Many of these things are very difficult to effectively quantify and work into an equation. Rich won a Vintage tourney with a Precon how do I work that into my equation without bias? Should that count the same as the recent Vintage for Cash tournament, that actually had one fewer player than Rich's precon tournament win, so maybe we should give it more weight when we analyze it since we're trying to be unbiased in our analysis? My point is that there is common sense involved in analyzing tournament data that can be hard to quantify and as a result it's not unreasonable to dismiss some results as invalid. This is a more extreme example, but it also happens on a smaller, less obvious scale.

[AmbivalentDuck]

it takes most people a PhD in physics to understand

...so that's an unreasonable expectation for your discussion here.  You can describe the gap, but I don't think that's a productive use of your time.  Either educate to close the gap, or move on.

There's a cynical third option where the authoritarian followers are temporarily ignored while the people who can think in terms of suitability/fitness/etc hammer out the best way to handle evidence of a deck's quality moving forward.

I think the right way to say this is that there are not enough tournaments in enough geographic locations to justify support for "winning at tournaments" as our standard of evidence going forward. That means that people who developed their standing in the community via that method will have to accept that their credibility will take a hit. That said, those same people are interested in the maintenance of the format, which provides a common value. We can appeal to our mutual desire for the continued existence of Vintage, particularly as it relates to standards of evidence generated by online play, to talk about what's abstractly "best" for generating interest and innovation in our format.

There's a debate possibly worth having elsewhere regarding the one-time suitability of the tournament performance standard on the grounds that it generated attendance despite its poor informative properties. Without tournaments for most to attend, the discussion is now very very lopsided.

Once a standard of evidence is hammered out, and potentially automated, the authoritarian followers will fall in line with the consensus: that's just what they do.

Edit:

how do I work that into my equation without bias?

I have zero disagreement with anything you said. The answer to that question is known to be Bayesian inference.

[hitman]

Addressing this as briefly as possible, it takes most people a PhD in physics to understand the math that underlies successful high frequency trading. This is the clearest example I can present where an idea is impossible to communicate in layman's terms but extremely profitable and worthwhile. The value of the idea is its fitness for making money.

My point isn't that the content of the communication is worthless. The communication of it to people who won't understand it is. That's why I'm saying your purpose can only be to toot your own horn. You know, or should know, that most members on TMD are not science post-graduates so why are you communicating what you know won't be understood?  You know what you're getting into when you post the way you do. You don't make an attempt to explain yourself, whether that's possible or not, and get increasingly condescending when confronted so I come to the conclusions I have about you.

[Prospero]

Let's continue to keep this conversation above brow.  Flaming, baiting, etc. (by anyone) won't be tolerated.

[Meddling Mike]

how do I work that into my equation without bias?

I have zero disagreement with anything you said. The answer to that question is known to be Bayesian inference.

I know Bayes' Rule from my actuarial studies, but I do not know about Bayesian Inference. I skimmed the wikipedia page and gathered that it's some method of adapting probability analysis to compensate for new evidence. I unfortunately don't have the time at this moment to get a proper understanding of the topic. Perhaps you could expand on how more specifically you would be analyzing the data to create an unbiased analysis you had said you would like people to take when viewing tournament results while dismissing invalid results like Rich's precon tournament win.

[Grand Inquisitor]

There's a cynical third option where the authoritarian followers are temporarily ignored while the people who can think in terms of suitability/fitness/etc hammer out the best way to handle evidence of a deck's quality moving forward.

Apologies, I understood one of your original points to be that you struggled to engage fruitfully with TMD.  If you're already doing this with some segment of the community, I'll gladly step aside.

If, instead, you're saying that this is happening with people outside of TMD, then why are you posting here?  That would seem to prove Hitman's point.

I think the right way to say this is that there are not enough tournaments in enough geographic locations to justify support for "winning at tournaments" as our standard of evidence going forward. That means that people who developed their standing in the community via that method will have to accept that their credibility will take a hit. That said, those same people are interested in the maintenance of the format, which provides a common value. We can appeal to our mutual desire for the continued existence of Vintage, particularly as it relates to standards of evidence generated by online play, to talk about what's abstractly "best" for generating interest and innovation in our format.

There seem to be a lot of joined assumptions here that are problematic (at least to me):

(1) There is no "our standard".  People are fond of tournament results because they're the most formalized sample of evidence (in terms of player identity, following the rules of play, etc) and because the cost of transaction presumes that people are mostly interested in competitive results.  However, as mentioned elsewhere above, there are a range of criteria and they vary person to person.
(2) I think people are much less concerned with the erosion of their street-cred, and much more concerned with understanding the merits of an alternative line of argument.
(3) I think the the issues of -a- determining 'good' decks in vintage and -b- maintaining the vibrancy of the format have overlap, but not as much as you would claim.
(4) I think the veracity of online play is subject to the varieties of (1).

[Thecheese]

i feel pretty dumb trying to keep up with this thread.

i pick things up and i put them down. i pick things up and i put them down.

[credmond]

This thread boils down to AD needing to show us in an example study what he means. I hope he does just that. Vintage could use an influx of new thinking and new methods.

However, until that happens, skepticism is the right call from a scientific perspective. It's not sufficient that some method X works for brainiacs in financial markets. It needs to port over and actually work and have predictive value for Vintage players. At any rate, skepticism from the general populace is a good thing since what you are talking about is tantamount to a paradigm shift in the way people look at Vintage data and people should not just take your word that there is a better way in theory of dealing with data when you haven't gone through and actually done a port of this potential method to Vintage. You need to show them.

Again, I hope you do just that. Vintage could use an influx of new thinking and new methods. I'll just kick back and wait and hope you brew something up.

[Norm4eva]

This thread boils down to AD needing to show us in an example study what he means. I hope he does just that. Vintage could use an influx of new thinking and new methods.

However, until that happens, skepticism is the right call from a scientific perspective. It's not sufficient that some method X works for brainiacs in financial markets. It needs to port over and actually work and have predictive value for Vintage players. At any rate, skepticism from the general populace is a good thing since what you are talking about is tantamount to a paradigm shift in the way people look at Vintage data and people should not just take your word that there is a better way in theory of dealing with data when you haven't gone through and actually done a port of this potential method to Vintage. You need to show them.

Again, I hope you do just that. Vintage could use an influx of new thinking and new methods. I'll just kick back and wait and hope you brew something up.

So, here's the thing about that though - the burden of proof swings both ways.

I really do not want to incur a derail, so please understand that I'm speaking not on the issues, but the methods by which they were addressed.  I'm also fairly certain that in both situations, I'm quoting Smmem's response, which I want to be clear is entirely by coincedence.  These are just anecdotal examples that I am bringing up over my lunch brak and not intended to be personally offensive or relevant at all.

1) Shahrazad's banning.  People were all over the place on this.  There was an argument brewing that the card blatantly defiled the notion of playing the best of 3 games, rather that Shahrazad necessarily created a situation where the game devolves into "best of 2 matches", since theoretically Shahrazad can just generate a mess of subgames that infinitely spiral into a lossless game state.  The problem with this is that, there was no data to back up that this was a thing that was actually happening; people would play Subgame.dec, but would be incidentally hated out of the meta because nobody just lets you resolve a Burning Wish if they know what's up (among other reasons).  So the threat was mitigated by the fact that people already knew how to deal with strategies tied to Wish as a win condition, and there were no tourney results backing up the banning.  It just happened.  My comment on this was "I see a lot of theory, but I do not see a single decklist or tournament report where Shah ever actually did what everyone says it does."  Smmem( I think) responded to this by saying, more or less, "Exactly.  There's absolutely no proof that this happens."

2) Lotus Vale.  So, rules change a lot and cards change with them, incidentally or otherwise.  Among them is Lotus Vale; it's received errata to keep its functionality the same as it was under the rules it was published under.  My argument to this was, "well, cards such as -this- and -this- and -this- never received errata, what makes Lotus Vale any different, except that it taps for 3 mana?" The response was "Because it would ruin Vintage." However, this argument was theoretical. No one proposed or tested a series of circumstances under which this is proven; it was an armchair call and it was just accepted.

So, the circumstances under which the burden of proof is required seems to be in flux.  Authoritarian attitudes arise out of situations like this.  It doesn't help anyone to not build the deck and test it in either of these conversations.

[Smmenen]

Dropping any attempt to make this readable to someone without some sort of postgraduate education...

Epistemology gets broken down differently by the various experts but everyone agrees roughly on the following progression:
"Knowledge is first-hand experience"
"Knowledge comes from authority"
"Knowledge is subjective"
"Knowledge is suitable for a purpose"
"Knowledge is inseparable from the knower due to uncertain observation"

I have only a vague idea what you are talking about.

Epistemology is a branch of philosophy dealing with the ways in which we acquire knowledge.  Historically, western civilizations dominant epistemology is reading the bible -- the transmission of knowledge from god.

In the modern world, our dominant epistemology is the scientific method -- which melds Baconian experience (experimentalism) and Cartesian rationalism (logic, etc).  

So, your list doesn't really make sense to me.  The lack of language and explanation in your posts makes them almost impossible to understand, even to people who understand the terms you are using.

Epistemologies are not downward-compatible. By caring that the average person can read your post and be inclined to agree with it, you're abandoning the rich frameworks that they lack and cannot be given quickly.

If what youre saying is:

"By trying to communicate in a way that allows the average person to understand what I am saying, I am necessarily reducing my ability to express higher order or sophisticated thoughts/ideas"

I could not disagree more.   That's just a sign of a bad communicator.  Instead of the word epistemology, you could just say "ways of knowing."  And if by "downward compatible," you mean "translatable into common English," of course they are.  

More to the point: You basically seem to be claiming that it's ok for your posts not be comprehensible to the average person so long as similarly education people can follow:  I would counter: it's not just that the average person can't understand what you are saying, even people with postgraduate education can't understand what you are saying because you don't take the time to actually parse out your points, leaving the vast majority of your meaning by inference and guesswork, and because your word choices are often cryptic and vague.  

I think the right way to say this is that there are not enough tournaments in enough geographic locations to justify support for "winning at tournaments" as our standard of evidence going forward.

That's not what I was saying, for the tenth time.  The standard of evidence is tournament performance over time.  By narrowing it to just "winning tournaments" you are misrepresenting the general view.  No one looks at a single tournament in isolation, but look for trends.  And far from being epistemologically bad, it is essentially Baconian -- induction through accumulated evidence towards general conclusions.   Every tournament is an experiment or data point, and the top 8 are the results. 

[JACO]

An interesting discussion fell out of the Mana Vault unrestriction thread:

In the future you don't have to say anything, you can just ignore him like everybody else who isn't clowning him.

What's curious to me is that my treatment here has been well in line with the behavior of a group known as "Authoritarian Followers." An authoritarian follower has a few interesting traits, but I'd never thought to apply them to my treatment here until I went back over my major scuffles.

Because my words spurred you to create this thread, I will address it more fully. I don't consider myself an authoritarian and gladly welcome ideas and input from all spheres of knowledge, but if you want to read something into what I've written for your own judgement that's fine. I choose to ignore most of what you write because I frequently find it to be irrelevant, incorrect, or inane. I choose to gloss over a lot of noise here because I value my time. Here are the most recent examples of your work (I'm not digging up older stuff about Jace and other things I find comically asinine).

4 Vampiric Tutor Vintage isn't inconceivable. It's a great card, but Imperial Seal isn't THAT much worse and it sees far less play. I'm not convinced that Vamp would actually be a 4-of. It would replace Mystical, sure. But I'm not convinced it would even be a 3 of in control. Combo would snap up every copy they could fit, but they're already tight with 4x Burning Wish.

Unlike every other card on Steve's list above Vamp, Vamp has an opposing uncounterable 1-mana counter in Extirpate.

Let me help you. Say that you disagree and then tell me why you think that a meta with unrestricted Vamp does not see a gross increase in Extirpate use. Unlike every other "unrestrictable" restricted card in Vintage...Unrestricted Vamp wouldn't be slots 61-63. It would replace other slots dedicated to tutoring, draw, and filtering.

Bringing up unrestricting Vampiric Tutor (which is a stupid idea) in a thread about unrestricting Mana Vault (another stupid idea). I can't wait to read more of your work.

Restrict:
Force of Will
Mana Drain
Bazaar of Baghdad
Mishra's Workshop

Unrestrict:
Trinisphere
Strip Mine
Flash
Gifts Ungiven
Balance
Ponder

Yes let's Restrict Force of Will and unrestrict Trinisphere, Strip Mine, and Flash. I can't wait to read more of your work.

To distinguish between something that is actually good, Magic players (and not just Vintage players) are trained by experience to demand -- not credentials -- but proof, and relevant proof: tournament results.

Trying to keep this discussion narrow... "Actually good" is poorly indicated by tournament performance.

As has been mentioned already by Steve and Rich, tournament performance is the main thing that matters to the vast majority of players who are looking to engage in strategic discourse about Magic. If a deck simply performs well on Cockatrice against a bunch of meatballs (almost) no one cares. Tournaments are the ultimate proving grounds, because they tie together a number of elements in game play that go beyond just the cards in a deck, regardless of format.


While I think it's great that you've taken the initiative to help run Cockatrice tournaments (which I feel is of benefit to the Vintage community), much of your writing makes me wish there was an ignore feature built into TMD so I can simply get to content I feel better suits my interests. I don't mean that as a personal insult, but as more of an explanation of, or commentary on, the efficiencies of wading through what I find to be a rising sea of inane posts and activity on TMD.

[brokenbacon]

i feel pretty dumb trying to keep up with this thread.

i pick things up and i put them down. i pick things up and i put them down.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[oshkoshhaitsyosh]

I agree, the only way to silence the haters is to put up results in a real life event with a given deck. 2-3 yrs ago everyone I played with hated on landstill and then I started playing and winning in side events, then I started playing and winning in the main events stringing off 3 consecutive wins at the blue bell events. Not until then did I get respect for playing the deck. And believe it or not I still had people not liking the deck or thinking it was just luck. So I am well aware of people hating on deck ideas. But the ONLY way to silence them is to put up results, and that's it. Cockatrice is full of terrible players, unless you have a buddy list of competent players...

[credmond]

An interesting discussion fell out of the Mana Vault unrestriction thread:

In the future you don't have to say anything, you can just ignore him like everybody else who isn't clowning him.

What's curious to me is that my treatment here has been well in line with the behavior of a group known as "Authoritarian Followers." An authoritarian follower has a few interesting traits, but I'd never thought to apply them to my treatment here until I went back over my major scuffles.

Because my words spurred you to create this thread, I will address it more fully. I don't consider myself an authoritarian and gladly welcome ideas and input from all spheres of knowledge, but if you want to read something into what I've written for your own judgement that's fine. I choose to ignore most of what you write because I frequently find it to be irrelevant, incorrect, or inane. I choose to gloss over a lot of noise here because I value my time. Here are the most recent examples of your work (I'm not digging up older stuff about Jace and other things I find comically asinine).

4 Vampiric Tutor Vintage isn't inconceivable. It's a great card, but Imperial Seal isn't THAT much worse and it sees far less play. I'm not convinced that Vamp would actually be a 4-of. It would replace Mystical, sure. But I'm not convinced it would even be a 3 of in control. Combo would snap up every copy they could fit, but they're already tight with 4x Burning Wish.

Unlike every other card on Steve's list above Vamp, Vamp has an opposing uncounterable 1-mana counter in Extirpate.

Let me help you. Say that you disagree and then tell me why you think that a meta with unrestricted Vamp does not see a gross increase in Extirpate use. Unlike every other "unrestrictable" restricted card in Vintage...Unrestricted Vamp wouldn't be slots 61-63. It would replace other slots dedicated to tutoring, draw, and filtering.

Bringing up unrestricting Vampiric Tutor (which is a stupid idea) in a thread about unrestricting Mana Vault (another stupid idea). I can't wait to read more of your work.

Restrict:
Force of Will
Mana Drain
Bazaar of Baghdad
Mishra's Workshop

Unrestrict:
Trinisphere
Strip Mine
Flash
Gifts Ungiven
Balance
Ponder

Yes let's Restrict Force of Will and unrestrict Trinisphere, Strip Mine, and Flash. I can't wait to read more of your work.

To distinguish between something that is actually good, Magic players (and not just Vintage players) are trained by experience to demand -- not credentials -- but proof, and relevant proof: tournament results.

Trying to keep this discussion narrow... "Actually good" is poorly indicated by tournament performance.

As has been mentioned already by Steve and Rich, tournament performance is the main thing that matters to the vast majority of players who are looking to engage in strategic discourse about Magic. If a deck simply performs well on Cockatrice against a bunch of meatballs (almost) no one cares. Tournaments are the ultimate proving grounds, because they tie together a number of elements in game play that go beyond just the cards in a deck, regardless of format.


While I think it's great that you've taken the initiative to help run Cockatrice tournaments (which I feel is of benefit to the Vintage community), much of your writing makes me wish there was an ignore feature built into TMD so I can simply get to content I feel better suits my interests. I don't mean that as a personal insult, but as more of an explanation of, or commentary on, the efficiencies of wading through what I find to be a rising sea of inane posts and activity on TMD.

Jaco, your response here actually makes AD's point here for him. I think you are being "authoritarian" here. You could have made all the above points without implying his ideas were "stupid" or "inane."

[AmbivalentDuck]

Unlike every other "unrestrictable" restricted card in Vintage...Unrestricted Vamp wouldn't be slots 61-63. It would replace other slots dedicated to tutoring, draw, and filtering.

Unlike every other "unrestrictable" restricted card in Vintage, the topdeck tutors have no consequences (except life loss) until after you've passed priority. Your opponent is forced to give you an opportunity to play an uncounterable trump that suddenly removes almost all of your tutoring, reveals your hand, and comes at no card advantage loss to them because you've already burnt some advantage using the topdeck tutors.

Unrestricted Vamp wouldn't be slots 61-63. It would replace other slots dedicated to tutoring, draw, and filtering.

Play nice.

Jaco, your response here actually makes AD's point here for him. I think you are being "authoritarian" here. You could have made all the above points without implying his ideas were "stupid" or "inane."

Thank you for noticing.

...

Your post deserves a longer and more thought out response than I have the attention for right now.

So, the circumstances under which the burden of proof is required seems to be in flux.  Authoritarian attitudes arise out of situations like this.  It doesn't help anyone to not build the deck and test it in either of these conversations.

Yup

This thread boils down to AD needing to show us in an example study what he means.

What I abstractly mean is that authoritarian standards of evidence have caused various ideas to be maltreated over the years. If I had to propose a standard of evidence right now, I'd suggest using the same modeling (more or less) used to predict game outcomes in baseball. They have many of the same sparsity issues we do.

There's a cynical third option where the authoritarian followers are temporarily ignored while the people who can think in terms of suitability/fitness/etc hammer out the best way to handle evidence of a deck's quality moving forward.

Apologies, I understood one of your original points to be that you struggled to engage fruitfully with TMD.  If you're already doing this with some segment of the community, I'll gladly step aside.

While I can't speak to present fruitfulness, I can say that many of the posters in this thread appear to "get it." In my 3rd or 4th attempt at communicating "it:" authoritarian standards of evidence support an authoritarian culture.

Perhaps you could expand on how more specifically you would be analyzing the data to create an unbiased analysis you had said you would like people to take when viewing tournament results while dismissing invalid results like Rich's precon tournament win.

The key there is that nobody accused him of cheating and nobody can responsibly claim that a precon has zero odds of winning. It's not an invalid result. There's a phrase that applies very well here: "Black Swan Event." The idea is that it's bound to capture our collective attention when someone wins a tourney with a precon, or a standard deck, or relentless rats.dec, or a highlander deck, etc. While the odds of each are very low, the odds of anomaly are significant.

The follow-up question that falls quickly out of that is, "How do I tell anomaly from more informative results?" Communally grab the list and play it 30 times against "the field."

[cvarosky80]

I agree, the only way to silence the haters is to put up results in a real life event with a given deck. 2-3 yrs ago everyone I played with hated on landstill and then I started playing and winning in side events, then I started playing and winning in the main events stringing off 3 consecutive wins at the blue bell events. Not until then did I get respect for playing the deck. And believe it or not I still had people not liking the deck or thinking it was just luck. So I am well aware of people hating on deck ideas. But the ONLY way to silence them is to put up results, and that's it. Cockatrice is full of terrible players, unless you have a buddy list of competent players...

I can recall hearing similar dissensions about Justin Kohler's UW Bomberman deck for the first 6 months or so that he ran it. Now, it can't be denied that it is a powerhouse deck in the format. On a personal level, I had been very dismissive of the Oath archetype over the past few years, especially this past year after the printing of Grafdigger's Cage. However, I can say that I've come around on that matter and truly respect the power that it can posses, and I even ran it (Something I swore I would never do) at an event back in the spring, especially after Greg's impressive run at the NEV Invitational with it. Results matter, case closed. And the reason they matter is because no amount of playtesting, no amount of theorizing, no amount of tweaking and tuning can ever replace a live tournament, no matter what deck you are playing. The consistent stability or instability of a deck over the course of several tournaments is what makes or breaks any deck out there.

Prior to the Invitational, I tested, tuned, and theorized a Cobra Gush deck that, in theory and testing, was primed to run through the expected metagame of that event. It went 1-3 in matches and 2-6 in games played before I dropped to play in 2 side events, where I won a combined 2 games with it in both of those. In testing, it ran through nearly every expected deck that was going to be at the event, and the expected metagame I had was nearly spot on, but, the deck proved to be highly unstable and inconsistent once things got "real." The point I'm making with this story is that dismissive attitudes before results come in can be justified, whether you, me, or anyone likes it or not. They can be justified simply because the burden of proof is on the person trying to push through something new or different than what has been successful, and if there are no results to back-up the argument, then it is hollow.

I have a lot of theories on a lot of widely different topics, but without any hard evidence to support some of them, I know that people's diismissiveness of those theories are justified, that's just a fact of life.

P.S. Josh's analysis of Cockatrice is about as spot-on as it can be. I've been playing this game, off-and-on, since 1995, and can say with total certainty that I had never seen a deck that ran as many Kobolds as I have on Cockatrice over this past year. And I see Kobolds every-single-time I have ever gone on there. And by never seen as many Kobolds, I mean never. Never saw a deck that was based around 0/1, 0 cc creatures until Cockatrice, where I see it 3 times an hour.

[Smmenen]

While I can't speak to present fruitfulness, I can say that many of the posters in this thread appear to "get it." In my 3rd or 4th attempt at communicating "it:" authoritarian standards of evidence support an authoritarian culture.

Authoritarian connotes top down rule.   It's the exact opposite of what this is: a thriving, bustling, and often disagreeing community.  

Calling this community authoritarian strikes one as polemics and obscures your real point: which is your disagreement with the general standards of evidence among Magic (not just Vintage) players.

[BC]

I usually try to stay away from these threads as much as possible, but unfortunately I have an opinion on this.

1.  I also have a Ph.D. in an engineering discipline.  I'm pretty sure we even got our degrees from the same school.  I could probably understand your posts if I sat down and tried to parse the language for a while, but why would I ever do anything so arduous?  Your writing is extremely opaque and pedantic.  I agree 100% with Smennen and others who have said that intelligent and effective writing not only CAN be accessible to the majority of readers, but absolutely SHOULD be.

2.  I love new ideas.  I often put together new deck ideas on Cockatrice when people post them on this site.  Unfortunately, through my testing I've found that most ideas that look bad at first are actually bad.  Proponents of new/usual ideas should be ready to defend them without getting all "butt hurt" when people don't immediately glom onto them.  

3.  The fact that people are dismissive and kind of dicky about weird ideas is not unique to TMD, or even the Magic community, or even the internet.  It is a problem inherent to human nature.  Internet forums just allow us to have a conversation where everybody gets to say as much as they want without getting interrupted, and without having to look anybody in the face while they talk.  It is the greatest and worst thing ever.

4.  It has been said multiple times, but the best way to get people to pay attention to your ideas is to do something (i.e., be successful in a tournament).  Before this summer, I'm sure 75% of the people on this site had never even heard of me, even though I've been in the Vintage community since ~2006.  Yet, after Vintage Champs this year there was much discussion of my crappy home-brew Workshop deck, without me even having to post it in a TMD thread.  Come to Gencon, it's not that far.  Top 8 a prelim.  Do well in the main event.  Write a tournament report.  People will pay attention.

[JACO]

Jaco, your response here actually makes AD's point here for him. I think you are being "authoritarian" here. You could have made all the above points without implying his ideas were "stupid" or "inane."

I was simply citing examples of why I will ignore posts of that nature. Do you think bringing up the unrestriction of Vampiric Tutor (in a thread about unrestricting Mana Vault) is a good idea? Do you think that unrestricting either of those would be beneficial to the health of the Vintage format? Do you think that simultaneously restricting Force of Will and Mana Drain while unrestricting Flash, Balance, Trinisphere, and Strip Mine is a good idea? If you don't think so then why the hell would it be remotely fruitful or relevant to discuss them? I must be an "authoritarian" because I am of the opinion that all of those are probably terrible ideas for the health of Vintage, which historical precedence tells us.


inane
adjective \i-ˈnān\
1: empty, insubstantial
2: lacking significance, meaning, or point : silly <inane comments>

[policehq]

I understand that you're a lawyer, but your behavior here is unacceptable. You're prioritizing "winning" this discussion over any reasonable attempt to aid in optimizing the suitability of this site's culture for any purpose.

I really disagree. It's a fair point for him to mention that your contributions here should be understandable to their audience. You're arguing that your ideas alone aren't getting the attention they inherently deserve, simply because they're ideas. Still, you're putting them in a vacuum and not taking into account their presentation. Your tone and word choice definitely play a part in your treatment here, not just terrible Goblins lists, outright dismissal of Goblins lists that put up top 8s, bad ideas for unrestriction*, and posts about all these poor proles that don't have a Master's degree or higher in a scientific field.

* I couldn't help but notice that you argued for Vampiric Tutor's unrestriction, pointing out how similar it is to Imperial Seal, which is rarely used. I'm sure there is some lofty reasoning behind this that I could simply never comprehend, but doesn't it make more sense, then, to make a case for removing IMPERIAL SEAL from the restricted list? I don't advocate this, of course, but I futilely wanted to understand your advanced logic.

[Prospero]

This thread has run its course.  There is no value to it, and we're starting to devolve.  Thread locked.