Published on October 6, 2025 9:27 PM GMT
Context: An old, rambling set of notes on "suck in the middle with bruce" by John R Fizzo.
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 LION'S 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.
Discuss
