Fifteen Things I Learned From Watching a Game of Secret Hitler

post by Zvi · 2018-12-17T13:40:01.047Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

Epistemic Status: Not likely to be true things. Right?

1. Liberals know nothing, fascists know everything.
2. Most of the policies democratic governments could pass are fascist policies that expand government power.
3. The remaining policies are liberal policies. There is no such thing as a conservative policy.
4. Liberal policies do nothing.
5. If the liberals do nothing enough times, they win and can congratulate themselves, no matter how much more fascist things got in the meantime.
6. Governments must always be passing new policies, and never take away old policies. Thus, government inevitably gets more powerful over time.
7. The more liberal policies you pass, the more likely it is any future policy will be fascist.
8. The more fascist policies you pass, the more likely it is any future policy will be fascist.
9. When the time comes to pass a policy, the government will choose from whatever proposals are lying around, even if all of them are fascist and everyone choosing is a liberal. There is almost never an option to just not do that, as such bold action requires a mostly fascist policy already be in place.
10. If the government fails to agree to pass one of the things lying around, that’s even worse, because it will then choose a new policy completely at random from what is lying around, which will probably be fascist.
11. Liberals spend most of their time being paranoid over which people claiming to be liberals are secretly fascists, or even secretly actual literal Hitler, as opposed to attempting to write or choose good policies.
12. Someone enacting liberal policies, but not in a position to assume dictatorial power, is providing strong evidence they are probably secretly Hitler.
13. When good people often have no choice but to do bad things, but there is no way to verify this, the default is for no one who is good to have any idea who is good and who is bad.
14. Despite this, good people think they know who is good and who is bad.
15. Introducing a random element to the play is good for veteran players, because the ‘good guys’ are no longer able to (and thus forced to as in Resistance/Avalon) fall back purely on an announced, deterministic strategy, as the ‘bad guys’ could know the rules and game the system.

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