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deception

What’s Wrong With Simulation in Football?

Written by Doug McConnell

The 2018 edition of the football world cup has brought with it a renewed bout of hand wringing over ‘simulation’, e.g. players falling, diving, and tumbling under imaginary fouls, rolling around in mock pain, or clasping their faces pretending to have been hit. Stuart James writes in the Guardian that “play-acting has been commonplace at this World Cup. It’s become a cancer in the game, not just a stain on it, and Fifa needs to find a cure.” But what exactly is wrong with this behaviour? Why is the rise of this behaviour ‘a cancer in the game’?Read More »What’s Wrong With Simulation in Football?

Scrabbling for Augmentation

By Stephen Rainey

 

Around a decade ago, Facebook users were widely playing a game called ‘Scrabulous’ with one another. It was pretty close to Scrabble, effectively, leading to a few legal issues.

Alongside Scrabulous, the popularity of Scrabble-assistance websites grew. Looking over the shoulders of work colleagues, you could often spy a Scrabulous window, as well as one for scrabblesolver.co.uk too. The strange phenomenon of easy, online Scrabulous cheating seemed pervasive for a time.

The strangeness of this can hardly be overstated. Friends would be routinely trying to pretend to one another that they were superior wordsmiths, by each deploying algorithmic anagram solvers. The ‘players’ themselves would do nothing but input data to the automatic solvers. As Charlie Brooker reported back in 2007,

“We’d rendered ourselves obsolete. It was 100% uncensored computer-on-computer action, with two meat puppets pulling the levers, fooling no one but themselves.”

Back to the present, and online Scrabble appears to have lost its sheen (or lustre, patina, or polish). But in a possible near future, I wonder if some similar issues could arise.Read More »Scrabbling for Augmentation

Polygraphs: placebo or trial by ordeal?

Chad Dixon, an Indiana man was recently sentenced to 8 months in jail for teaching people how to beat polygraph tests. The sticking point seems to be that polygraphs are used by the US federal authorities for screening applicants and detecting crimes, so if people could get past them they could do all sorts of nefarious things. But the reliability of polygraph tests is highly dubious, and false positives may have stalled many careers. So of course the UK is considering making polygraph testing compulsory for sex offenders, something the blogger Neurobonkers described as a return to trial by ordeal. Is it unethical to teach people to circumvent these tests?

Read More »Polygraphs: placebo or trial by ordeal?

Lying in the least untruthful manner: surveillance and trust

When I last blogged about the surveillance scandal in June, I argued that the core problem was the reasonable doubts we have about whether the oversight is functioning properly, and that the secrecy makes these doubts worse.  Since then a long list of new revelations have arrived. To me, what matters is not so much whether foreign agencies get secretly paid to spy, doubts about internal procedures or how deeply software can peer into human lives, but how these revelations put a lie to many earlier denials. In an essay well worth reading Bruce Schneier points out that this pattern of deception severely undermines our trust in the authorities, and this is an important social risk: democracies and market economies require us to trust politicians and companies to an appropriate extent.

Read More »Lying in the least untruthful manner: surveillance and trust

‘Losses disguised as wins’: Slot machines and deception

Last week, Canadian researchers published a study showing that some modern slot machines ‘trick’ players – by way of their physiology – into feeling like they are winning when in fact they are losing. The researchers describe the phenomenon of ‘losses disguised as wins’, in which net losses involving some winning lines are experienced in the same way as net wins due to physiological responses to the accompanying sounds and lights. The obvious worry is that players who are tricked into thinking they’re winning will keep playing longer and motivate them to come back to try again.

The game set up is as follows: players bet on 15 lines simultaneously, any of which they might win or lose. A player will accrue a net profit if the total amount collected from all winning lines is greater than the total amount wagered on all 15 lines. Such an outcome is accompanied by lights and sounds announcing the wins. However, lights and sounds will also be played if any of the lines win, even if the net amount collected is less than the total amount wagered on all 15 lines. If a player bets 5 credits per line (5 x 15 = 75) and wins 10 back from 3 (= 30), then the player has actually lost money, even though the lights and sounds indicate winning. The loss, the researchers claim, is thus disguised as a win.Read More »‘Losses disguised as wins’: Slot machines and deception