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April 4, 2018 9:29 AM

How can we use the Magic: The Gathering color wheel (White, Blue, Black, Red, Green) as a fake framework to "draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy for ways of being that are different from your own"?
posted by the man of twists and turns (41 comments total)

oh boy is this the thread where we argue over the color identities of real and fictional people because if it is i need to go get my whiteboard
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 9:37 AM on April 4, 2018 [14 favorites]

The archetypal black organization would be a hedge fund or a startup, and a black Dystopia would be a totalitarian dictatorship.

So... Libertarians?
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:46 AM on April 4, 2018

He cites Ayn Rand as an archetypal "Black" thinker later, so yes, I think so.
posted by codacorolla at 9:50 AM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I got up to the "blue" section and had to stop, because it put me so strongly in mind of the whole JUSTICE VERSUS MERCY thing, where two concepts that are not at all opposed are made out to be opposed -- or in this case, not opposed but inherently different. How can something be right but not make sense? For something to be considered Right within a "moral or cultural framework", it must by definition make sense within that framework. And is not "do the sensible thing" -- or rather, the thought involved in deciding what Sensible means -- itself an enactment of some moral or cultural framework?

Argh
posted by inconstant at 9:58 AM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I cannot wait for the day I get to take a quiz at some self-improvement seminar I have to do for work that asks whether I see myself as more of a necromancer or a thaumaturge.
posted by Copronymus at 10:10 AM on April 4, 2018 [16 favorites]

Okay yeah, but how cool is this new art for the Saga cards!?
posted by ODiV at 10:19 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

I’m a land!
posted by No-sword at 10:22 AM on April 4, 2018 [23 favorites]

How can something be right but not make sense?

Sounds like a pretty white thing to say.
posted by 256 at 10:34 AM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

it put me so strongly in mind of the whole JUSTICE VERSUS MERCY thing, where two concepts that are not at all opposed are made out to be opposed -- or in this case, not opposed but inherently different. How can something be right but not make sense? For something to be considered Right within a "moral or cultural framework", it must by definition make sense within that framework. And is not "do the sensible thing" -- or rather, the thought involved in deciding what Sensible means -- itself an enactment of some moral or cultural framework?

you're so chaotic, i can't talk to you
posted by Smart Dalek at 10:42 AM on April 4, 2018

They totally just ignored the "nature red in tooth and claw" aspect of green. Their interpretation loosk to be mroe green-white.

Sometimes, victory feels like mauling someone in the face like an angry grizzly bear.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:43 AM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

You jest, 256, and I was kind of expecting that species of response, but that's my point exactly -- who goes around thinking "ah yes, this is pure nonsense, but it sure is the right thing to do" unless they are thinking "nonsense" or "right thing" from someone else's point of view? And vice versa.

[UNREASONABLY HET UP ABOUT SILLY CLASSIFICATIONAL THINGMABOBS]
posted by inconstant at 10:44 AM on April 4, 2018

I think the point is that white doesn't ever think that the right thing is nonsense, simply because, as you identify, it being right means that it inherently makes sense. But the axioms that allow it to make sense can be, to white, complex faith-based beliefs. Blue, on the other hand, has to tear everything down and rebuild it from first principles in order to see if it really makes sense or not.

White doesn't kill you because murder is wrong. Blue doesn't kill you because they recognize that that behaviour would destabilize the social contract.
posted by 256 at 10:52 AM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

Digging through this, seems a bit odd in spots (Fairly prone to the Harry Potter & The Methods of Rationality-fanbase trap of wanting to avoid overly praising the groups they identify with, but still doing it), and definitely LessWrong-derived/adjacent, but on the other hand, the example midway down of "Oh hey, thinking in terms of this helped me figure out that my friend probably wasn't being helped in getting through depression by additional structure (White vs. Red)" seems pretty decent for someone coming at this concept sideways, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by CrystalDave at 10:54 AM on April 4, 2018

I really wish I had played this game back in the day. I don't have the time to play or the money to build a deck in 2018, but I love reading and seeing others enjoy this world. I love stuff like this.
posted by Fizz at 10:56 AM on April 4, 2018

Blue doesn't kill you because they recognize that that behaviour would destabilize the social contract.

...and not wanting to destabilize the social contract is still part of a value system! Utilitarianism is no less a moral framework than any other you might care to name!
posted by inconstant at 11:04 AM on April 4, 2018

Don't nitpick too hard, folks. The author prefaced the entire article with a disclaimer that it's a "fake framework." The author knows it's not perfect, and his understanding of the color wheel philosophies isn't perfect, but it's still interesting.
posted by explosion at 11:14 AM on April 4, 2018 [6 favorites]

explosion, I'm just not sure you know what the comment section here is for.
posted by graventy at 11:45 AM on April 4, 2018 [9 favorites]

Okay yeah, but how cool is this new art for the Saga cards!?

Definitely an improvement over the KKK-inspired art inked by an actual white supremacist during the Legends set.
posted by duffell at 11:48 AM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

As usual with things that somehow come from LessWrong, I feel like a subtle point is being missed: Thinking of frameworks as fake but useful is not itself that useful. A framework is useful (in a particular context) or it's not. If it's useful, it's true, for some definition of "true" — adjust the amount of hand-waving you do here to your own taste.

In academic epistemology this is called pragmatism! Truth is usefulness and usefulness is truth. We're all abstraction machines and all abstractions are leaky and that's fine.

The LessWrong article about "fake frameworks" uses roads as an example, for Christ's sake. If you're so committed to reductionism that you're willing to challenge the concept of something as basic and concrete as a road as "fake" then... well, then you're probably too committed to reductionism.

Not that I'm objecting to this "fake framework" idea, just to the "fake" framing. Why not just, um, "framework?" If it's useful, why's it gotta be fake? "Not useful in all contexts," sure, but no belief is useful in all contexts. Everything is an imperfect model.

One piece of recommended reading: Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 12:04 PM on April 4, 2018 [9 favorites]

anyway I think I'm black-blue
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 12:06 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

a mirror and an encyclopedia: Yes! That's a great way to put it. There was something that bothered me about that framing that I couldn't put my finger on. It reminds me of that The Office sociopath article linked about a year ago, where it goes through this whole dog and pony show of saying, "well, this is just for funsies, don't take it too seriously!" while also taking itself very seriously.
posted by codacorolla at 12:07 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Oh, this one?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:11 PM on April 4, 2018

Yeah, I found the original lesswrong article on fake frameworks to be bizarrely nonsensical, like it was creating a lot of philosophical work for itself where none need exist.

It's called an analogy, and we all know how it works.

That said, the MTG colour pie is pretty neat, so I'm happy to talk about that even if I'm not thrilled about the road that got us here.

Also, yes, everyone should read Kuhn.
posted by 256 at 12:13 PM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

My seven year old came home from Afterschool a few weeks back and announced that he had not only played Magic, but liked it. I then yelled "I HAVE A SON!!" and ran up to the attic to bring down box after box of cards collected over the past 25 years. He flipped out at the bounty and helped me make him a surprisingly vicious White soldier/knight/lifegain deck. After he went to bed, I spent several hours making a still yet more nasty monoblack drain/consume deck followed by an hour of toning it down (aka removing the playsets of Demonic Tutors and Damnations. The Cabal Coffers remained, though, I am far from a perfect parent).

The two decks battle it out pretty well - if he can punch me in the face enough with soldiers and knights before my Death Star Drain Life comes on line, he wins. If he pulls the Akroma that's in there, he wins. In his crowning moment, he managed to get a pair of Soul Wardens (+1 life each for every creature that enters play) and the King of Kjeldor (creates a soldier for each damage you take) - I missed the combo and did 18 damage to him, which pretty much doubled his life and filled his ranks with soldiers. I ended up losing pretty badly and he ended up fascinated by the concept of the combo, which at 7 is still a little hard for him to understand.

I've started to explain the color wheel to him in terms of what he wants from a deck (beyond "to beat Daddy again"). He likes big creatures, of course, but is not that taken with Green. His favorite card is Pacifism, so I suspect that the apple has not fallen far from the tree and we have a control-type at hand. We're just now dipping our toes into dual colored decks and he seems to like the White/Black Vampires deck I picked up and the Red/Black Minotaur Pirate deck the Easter Bunny gave him.

I've yet to use the color wheel to describe people or behaviors as saying "That is a very black thing to do" requires a level of decorum that 7 year olds lack. Still, maybe we can use this as a way to talk about the books he reads (assuming he continues to like to read - last night he had a freakout when he learned that Eragon is not about a boy who turns into a dragon but a boy who discovers a dragon) and what he thinks about certain characters.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 12:16 PM on April 4, 2018 [14 favorites]

I kinda loved this, mostly because I play green basically anytime I can build a green deck and I have a lot of complicated feelings about whether this means I'm actually a Hufflepuff or if it's just that I like playing plants and animals more than zombies or soldiers or wizards.

That said, obvious bias is obvious, you can say blue is the color of scholars or you can say it's the color of pedantic rules lawyers always out to exploit a loophole. YA I SAID IT FITE ME BLUES
posted by potrzebie at 12:19 PM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

do you think we can draw a dichotomy on this site between users of Classic Blue and Professional White
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 12:22 PM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

It does feel like the author warped the colour wheel to make it more relevant to actual human relationships. In MTG, Black has no particular association with individual sovereignty or self-determination -- it's all straight up exploitation, torture, and sacrificing cultists to build the ranks of your zombie army. That's maybe less useful for understanding and sympathizing with people who are different from you though.

I disagree with the author's categorization of some characters, but I'm not sure if that's because he's redefined the meaning of the colours or because I just happen to interpret the specific characters differently. (Surely Ozymandias is U/W? And Peter Pan and Jack Sparrow don't seem at all B/R to me.)
posted by Kilter at 12:27 PM on April 4, 2018

The idea of a "fake framework" is interesting - it seems to boil down to "yes, I know not everyone fits into these mental boxes, and I need to remind myself of this, but they work often enough to be a useful mental tool for dealing with the world and the people in it" - but holy crap I sure do not understand any of this Magic lore.

Then again I tried playing Magic for the first time a few years ago and all I took away from it was that the instruction flyer was very keen on convincing me that YOU ARE A PLANESWALKER and really not much interested in actually, like, telling me the basics of how the game worked or defining any of the words it was clearly using in special game-jargon contexts. What color does that make me?
posted by egypturnash at 1:50 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Black has no particular association with individual sovereignty or self-determination -- it's all straight up exploitation, torture, and sacrificing cultists to build the ranks of your zombie army

I mean, throwing colleagues and co-workers into the Pit for personal gain doesn't exactly scream "works well in groups, team player."
posted by logicpunk at 1:53 PM on April 4, 2018

In MTG, Black has no particular association with individual sovereignty or self-determination -- it's all straight up exploitation, torture, and sacrificing cultists to build the ranks of your zombie army.

Have you read any of Mark Rosewater's think pieces/blog posts about the color wheel? If you're basing your understanding of the colors purely on the cards, sure, what you're saying makes sense. But the design team at Wizards does think and talk (and write publicly) about the motivations and worldviews of each of the colors. Mark Rosewater has explicitly said that black isn't necessarily evil and that capitalism draws from a black morality--I mean, as an anticapitalist, I disagree with his opinion but do agree with his mapping.
posted by overglow at 1:59 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

> The idea of a "fake framework" is interesting - it seems to boil down to "yes, I know not everyone fits into these mental boxes, and I need to remind myself of this"

Well, that's a take on it I hadn't considered. It makes me a bit more sympathetic to the "fake framework" terminology. My philosophical objections to the idea of a useful framework being "fake" are maybe overridden by the practical value of reminding people not to put other people in rigid boxes.

I mean, the ideal solution IMO is still for everyone to remember that all frameworks of all kinds are, in this sense, "fake," so the "fake framework" category is not meaningful. But maybe that's a bit too much to hope for, and people desperately love to over-reify categories when applied to other human beings, and anything that encourages people to be a bit more flexible and sensitive and exercise caution when categorizing others is definitely a good thing.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 2:10 PM on April 4, 2018

In other related news, the Major Arcana of the Tarot are not actually universal archetypes.
posted by benzenedream at 2:39 PM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

pedantic rules lawyers always out to exploit a loophole. YA I SAID IT FITE ME BLUES


Idk, I think of blues as insecure type A's who need the illusion of control and universal denial to buffer their frail egos.

...Not that I've thought about it before or anything.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 3:56 PM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

In other related news, the Major Arcana of the Tarot are not actually universal archetypes.

try using magic cards for tarot, now we're getting somewhere
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 4:45 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

That said, obvious bias is obvious, you can say blue is the color of scholars or you can say it's the color of pedantic rules lawyers always out to exploit a loophole. YA I SAID IT FITE ME BLUES

You are correct. Like half of the rules errata column-inches are dedicated to edge conditions about the stack and counterspells. My personal favorite: can a counterspell counter itself? The obvious answer is no, because it's not a valid target when cast. But there are spells that change the targets of other spells, and no obvious means of preventing the paradox other than an errata.

Thankfully, I never bothered to spend the 4 bucks for a playset of counterspells, and never acquired a fullset through boosters. Instead I went for the other rules lawyer approach: infinite mana combo deck. My other deck was a pretty fun white archery deck that held okay in 1:1 but shone in group play where I could make some pretty hilarious snipes in combat I wasn't directly involved in.
posted by pwnguin at 5:44 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Dude is SERIOUSLY overthinking this facebook quiz
posted by edheil at 6:02 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

The obvious answer is no, because it's not a valid target when cast.
This is, in fact, only because of the rule that says a spell can never target itself. The very first step in casting a spell is putting the card on top of the stack, so it is a spell on the stack by the time you're choosing targets and paying costs for it.

Yes, I am a total rules nerd. My favorite card is Sundial of the Infinite, an artifact with the seemingly dubious power of ending your own turn. (Turns out that when a turn ends at an unusual time, you can do all sorts of weird interactions that people don't tend to expect.)
posted by NMcCoy at 8:08 PM on April 4, 2018

(I am extremely blue/red, even if my decks themselves are often other colors. Can't make a Progenitor Mimic into a copy of Parallel Lives without green, after all.)
posted by NMcCoy at 8:14 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

The idea of a fake framework first came to me with Tarot, in fact, when I read about it being used in life coaching or therapy or something similar, where nobody pretended it was real but you used the cards as a jumping off point, think a out what they *could* mean to you, we're they real sort of thing. This has been most helpful to me to convince my colleagues and myself to not dismiss the meyers-briggs test sessions we have been put through at work as a total waste of time, despite how often that framework has been shown to be flawed.

I don't know a lot about MtG but may find myself doing a lot of research am I ever required to run one such session.
posted by ominous_paws at 11:51 PM on April 4, 2018

I really wish I had played this game back in the day. I don't have the time to play or the money to build a deck in 2018, but I love reading and seeing others enjoy this world. I love stuff like this.
posted by Fizz

My parents refused to let me purchase MTG cards as a kid because those witchcraft cards were forbidden by Christianity or something. I ended up creating hundreds of "fake" cards by printing out the card text from memory and taping them onto regular playing cards and even sleeving them in plastic, so I could play and refine virtually any deck we wanted with my sibling. I even played with my friend's real decks: they didn't mind playing against my fake cards as long as I played "fair" with a cheaper dollar value deck than theirs - all decks had a sum dollar value of their cards and I really enjoyed the optimization aspect of it - it was like building a Warhammer 40k miniatures army with a "point value" cost for each model, it was a balance of cost vs effectiveness.

I got pretty decent at it. Later in life my friend would pay my entry into the pre-release events in return for my cards and winnings after - you paid some money for some new pre-release packs, you had to make a deck out of it, and you played against other players, and depending on how many games you won, you would win extra booster packs. I could usually win at least 6 out of 8 matches, so I would earn quite a lot of value for my sponsor. I had no use for the cards afterwards, anyway, but my goodness, cracking open a completely new set of unreleased cards and playing them against other players in competition was such a good time. I especially liked meeting new players so I could teach them how to build a deck properly after the match. I also really liked winning the first 3 brackets 6-0 and then coming to the final bracket (I would be drawn against another guy who also won 6-0) and then agreeing with him - presumably another strong player - to report a 1-1 draw to the judge regardless of the outcome of the games so we could split the winnings (we were just excited to play our decks against each other). It was very friendly like that.
posted by xdvesper at 12:41 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

xdvesper: Collusion! Agreeing to draw but offering someone prize packs to do it is collusion and fixing! JUDGE?
posted by TrishaLynn at 11:15 AM on April 5, 2018