On Empathy as a Skill in High Level Magic

Table of Contents

• Intro

• A Disclaimer

• The Deeply Vexing Nature of Information Sharing

• Soft Fabrics and Solid Bonds

• Is Culture Destiny?

I've recently been working my way through a huge anthology of Ursula K. Le Guin's books, and they've done what the best sci-fi can do: completely blow you away with their expansive vision of what humanity can be and can achieve. However, Le Guin's writing doesn't use the stereotypical tools of science fiction to accomplish this task, those of physics and astronomy and technology so far advanced that it feels like magic. These things are of course present in her worlds -- but far more central to the plot of these stories is the technology of culture. The social worlds her characters inhabit are indeed vastly different from ours, in ways far more advanced, yet possessing all the same quirks and tragedies of our own deeply complex social dynamics. Material resources are distributed unevenly, those who have difficulty understanding in the cultural context they are raised in struggle to find connection and dignity, and entire societies make dramatic, systemic errors in understanding and supporting those who are different from the norm.

Le Guin's main characters are no superhuman exceptions to this pattern. They exist as beings shaped by the world they inhabit, who struggle to understand the deeply alien ways that humans raised in other cultures try and interface with them. They make mistakes, they misunderstand, they misinterpret both behavior and communication. But they often still end up achieving remarkable things, through working with beings that are extremely different from them. How?

In short, I think Le Guin's characters succeed because they successfully empathize with their "alien" brethren (nearly every character in her novels, by my understanding, is descended from a common humanity - this "alienation" is one of culture more often than one of biology).

These books have helped me think about a skill that I think gets under-discussed when it comes to high level tournament Magic -- the ability to work and communicate effectively with people whose communication styles, mental patterns, and cultural background may be very different from yours.

A Disclaimer

A habit I've gotten into with these more serious pieces is disclaiming at the start that I don't want to portray myself here as someone who has access to a skill others don't. I'm going to do that again.

Part of this habit to disclaim and put my weaknesses to the forefront comes from what I've learned about myself from others. I've been told (by people who love me deeply) that I can come off as very haughty and intellectually superior. To the extent that I understand this tendency, which is still an imperfect understanding, I think it is a product of both unconscious cultural conditioning and poor social awareness skills.

We love labels, don't we folks? But in this case I think the labels are useful for communicating so I'm going to use them. Basically what I'm saying is that I'm an autistic person who has been socially categorized as a white man for most/all of my life. This has effects both on how people still perceive me and how I've learned to behave!

When I am passionate about a topic, and feel like I'm in a safe enough social setting to engage with someone else in a disagreement on it, I tend to express my opinions very concretely and definitively, in a way that might be interpreted as directly inviting (or provoking) disagreement and pushback -- but can equally be interpreted as a combative defense of my own intellectual superiority and unwillingness to listen to said pushback.

As someone who has been treated as a white man my whole life, it is much easier for me to feel like I am in a "safe enough social setting" to express direct disagreement than it is for others. It's also easy for me to assume my ideas will be respected and taken seriously, and easy for me to be blind to the fact that others might not be able to make the same assumption with such confidence. My poor skills in interpreting others' social cues can make it harder to identify when my obliviousness to these things are creating a barrier between me and the people I want to be arguing in good faith with.

I explain all this not to claim that I've conquered these faults of mine, but to acknowledge that I am not writing a post about empathy and soft social skills because I am the best at them and need to teach them to the rest of you. Part of the inspiration to write this piece was a conversation with a teammate after PT FF who called my attention to a few times I had been dismissive of them in an unintentionally aggressive way that sabotaged what could have been productive conversations.

In short, I am no less a product of the world I was raised in and the way my inherent nature interacts with that world than the characters in Le Guin's books. As a result of this, I am going to make mistakes and stumble in my understandings of others. This is a piece about how to navigate through, not avoid, those mistakes.

The Deeply Vexing Nature of Information Sharing

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

Magic is hard.

Let's get more specific:

Magic is a game about extrapolating from incomplete data.

The reason preparing for a Magic tournament is difficult is that you don't have enough time to collect the necessary information to come to a complete understanding of the format you are playing -- the popular decks/archetypes, how they match up with one another, the possible variations that can be made on them to change these interactions, and how those cascade into the decision-making incentives of your opponents. These things we are trying to determine are statistical patterns, both in human behavior and in game mechanics.

To figure these patterns out, we need data. How often can a particular card be answered in a given matchup? Will other people come to the same conclusions as you and adjust their decks to account for this information? Do they have stronger incentives elsewhere that prevent them from doing this?

The amount of data that would be needed to deterministically compute the answers to these things, or even to statistically infer them with high confidence, is very literally far too large to ever hope to collect enough. And yet--this is the task given to us. We need to do the best we can with the time we have.

You can try to collect this data all on your own by only extrapolating from the games you have directly played or seen. If you're extremely, extremely good at this, it can be enough -- but this increases the threshold for your skill at extrapolating from small sample sizes, and still requires you personally to put in more and more hours of gameplay if you want to increase the size of the dataset you are working from. This isn't always feasible for various reasons (time, money, disability to name a few).

So how do we expand our dataset without playing or watching games of Magic?

Simple -- we listen to other people about the games they've played. I'm going to call these people "teammates", though I don't exclusively mean formal teammates -- anyone whose experiences you use as data to help you get better at Magic and who uses yours in turn, deserves to be called a teammate. By far the most valuable aspect of working with other people in Magic is the significantly higher level of information flow that can be achieved compared to working alone.

Here's the problem, though...

What the Fuck are People Saying When they Say Things?

"Prowess can't lose to Omni postboard, I'm 12-1 in postboard games".

"This limited format is about card advantage in my experience".

"I don't think that deck is real but it could be".

"I'm not super confident but I think your best plan is to kill them quickly".

"I don't know what I'm talking about yet but I've trophied with two black decks so far and both of them had multiple copies of Cornered by Black Mages".

"I am sort of of the opinion most tutors in most decks are fake but I am far from an Amulet scientist".

Magic players say a lot of things. Sometimes these things are said confidently. Sometimes they are said with reference to a lot of direct experience. Sometimes they are said with a disclaimer of a lack of experience. Sometimes they are said based on strong intuition, but are phrased in nuanced or complex ways, other times they are said based on weak intuition, but very straightforwardly. Sometimes they are said during moments of stress, other times in moments of joy. Sometimes they are said by players with an impressive resume of tournament success. Sometimes they are said by players without any resume of tournament success.

To use any of the experiences of others as data to help us build our own understanding of a particular Magic problem, especially one that is about our ability to project the behavior of our opponents in a given tournament, we need to have a mechanism for filtering these statements into a best-guess understanding of the data they are informed by and the mental processes that are turning that data into someone's opinion.

In other words, we need to extrapolate (infer the experiences and beliefs of others) based on incomplete data (their own statements about these experiences and beliefs). If we're in a teammate relationship with these "others", they also need to be able to do the same thing with the statements we make. Once again, we're back to extrapolation based on incomplete data -- but now there is an added barrier of communication and language between us and the information we need.

How do we navigate this barrier?

Well, it certainly helps to have a solid mental model of the people you're communicating with, and to be able to trust that they are communicating with you in good faith.

Soft Fabrics and Solid Bonds

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

Communication is hard.

But why is it hard?

Part of it is that language is an imprecise medium for transferring ideas. Part of it is that every person has their own way of thinking, of processing and sharing information. Part of it is that every person is working from a different set of life experiences, cultural backgrounds, and linguistic patterns.

The way I understand empathy as a skill, or a type of intelligence, is the ability to build more and more accurate models of another person's unique character, communication style, and emotional and social tendencies.

Unsurprisingly, the better we are able to do this, the better we are going to be able to extrapolate from the language a person uses to the data they may be working from.

If a teammate says "Deck X is the best deck in the format", and I previously thought deck X was weak, some questions that might help me understand how much I need to adjust my own evaluation of deck X, or other players' likelihood to register this deck independently of my evaluation, are:

• How willing is this teammate to phrase their opinions in bold/definitive terms?

• How likely is this teammate to make jokes that are based on exaggerations of their loosely held opinions?

• How likely is this teammate to make jokes that are based on intentionally misstating their opinions in ways that they assume other people will recognize as clearly the opposite of what they truly believe?

• Who did my teammate say this to? Do they have a close, trusting relationship with that person? Is it a relationship where respect goes both ways?

• Does this teammate enjoy starting arguments or do they try to avoid doing so?

• Was the teammate who said this stressed or relaxed at the time? How does this typically influence the accuracy and intensity of their statements?

I could go on, but I think some of you are probably getting a bit freaked out by my willingness to analyze others' behavior in such explicit ways. I don't mean to say that any of this is happening consciously, although sometimes I might be consciously asking myself these questions if I'm especially confused as to how to interpret something someone has said. Most of the time though, this processing is happening subconsciously, in the same way that any of us do most of our social processing. I just find it helpful to make some of this explicit because that is usually what helps me improve in a particular skill!

Being able to answer these questions about a person, and therefore being able to more effectively extrapolate crucial information about the Magic they have been playing and the opinions they have formed from it, requires a strong bond with them and the building of trust. You can't know someone deeply if they don't want to be known to you, and you can't make yourself known to them if they don't trust you enough to believe you.

But how do we build this kind of strong bond with someone before we are even able to communicate with them effectively?

You have to start with the things that are easy to communicate about. Things that can be said very simply.

"I want us to work well together".

"I want both of us to succeed at this tournament".

"I want to understand what you're saying but I'm finding it hard to".

"I respect you as a player and a thinker and believe you are well-meaning".

"I want to make sure you feel comfortable talking to me and disagreeing with me".

The more you suspect that miscommunication might be happening, the more important it becomes to return to the basics, the common ground, the things that are difficult to miscommunicate.

This is something that Le Guin portrays very effectively in her characters -- the instinct to assume good faith, to attempt to resolve miscommunication, and the skill at doing so by finding common ground, no matter how basic and how emotionally simple.

To some extent, this is about recognizing the fragile social fabric of a team, a testing house, or a discord server. These are not things that are held together by the logo on a jersey, the walls of an Airbnb, or the sharing of an invite link. They are held together by relationships between people, which are unavoidably and blessedly soft and fragile things.

Tournament Magic may be under-supported and under-promoted, but if there's one thing I wished more folks understood about it, it would be that it's also an extremely competitive sport being played by extremely talented people who have poured large portions of their lives into the goal of becoming more skilled than everyone else in the world at what they do.

This is a classic recipe for ego, selfish behavior, and interpersonal status comparison to become the dominant social norm.

Do you think we see this anywhere in the culture of competitive Magic?

I'm not even going to stoop to the level of thinking that question needs answering. From the lowest to the highest levels, when trying to work with other extremely competitive Magic players, it is always necessary to overcome the more individually-focused social tendencies that world-class competition incentivizes if you want to work effectively as a team. Without this work, a team can easily break down into merely a set of individual actors trying to extract information from each other for their own benefit without working for the benefit of the whole.

Some people may not think the effort is worth it, and I respect their process just as much as someone who evaluates that their best chance to win is by building strong social bonds and learning from others. It is legitimately a large amount of effort to build strong relationships with other people!

Some people find this easier, and some find it harder. I don't want to moralize here about the level of effort different folks put into working collaboratively vs. independently. All I want to say is that if you want to gain the benefits of working collaboratively, which are extremely powerful, these "soft" skills are necessary to have and this is necessary work to do. You cannot gain the benefits of working with a team unless you put in the work to know the people on that team intimately.

Is Culture Destiny?

Intelligence is not one thing. There are many different ways to achieve the same goal, and what I think is beautiful about ruthlessly competitive systems is that they incentivize finding the best ways to achieve those goals. The best platforms for competition are ones where, even and especially at the highest levels, dramatically different methods and strategies can be used to achieve success. This property is an indicator of systems that are complex enough to elude our current levels of intelligence, and I believe Magic to be one of those systems for the time being. The journey towards finding the best way to win at Magic is still in progress. The story is still being written.

However, this being a benefit of competitive systems doesn't mean that the incentives in the way a particular system has been set up or developed aren't skewed unfairly towards one strategy or another. No structure of competition is exempt from the forces of the culture that created it and the culture that sustains it.

Competitive tournament Magic was created in and continues to be supported by a capitalistic, white supremacist, patriarchal, and individualistic culture. This is not to say it reflects this culture any more than any other institution that exists within it, but it is certainly to say that it doesn't do so any less. One way this cultural influence affects tournament Magic is that it reduces opportunities for people who are better at deploying a more interpersonal and community-based type of intelligence to wield that intelligence in ways that lead to competitive success.

Still, in their best moments, competitive systems allow the truly talented to break through and succeed in ways that defy traditional expectations for what kinds of skills and strategies are the strongest.

I've said before that Magic is a game about learning, but what might not be obvious is that there are many ways learning can be done. Learning from and about others is an under-utilized skill in competitive Magic, and one thing about under-utilized strategies is that they can cause breakthroughs in even the most established competitive systems.

Is culture destiny?

I like to imagine Ursula K. Le Guin would reply with the kind of cheeky non-answer answer I've come to adore in thinkers I truly respect:

"Yes. But maybe it can be changed."