Hi, I will be discussing a topic today that has not been talked about on the sub: 6 cognitive biases that are holding you back from analyzing units fairly and building better "off-meta" squads. I have a background in competitive Pokemon and Hearthstone and similar articles have been written for those games so I figured that it would be worthwhile to make an article about this topic with relation to Brave Frontier. I am simply interested in this area and am not a professional in psychology (at least not yet) so I will be taking all definitions from Wikipedia. This article was largely inspired by an article about Magic: The Gathering. Whenever I mention a point about choosing whether to summon for a unit, I am not targeting players who have the resources to pull for any and all units, but rather the players who have limited resources and need to make informed decisions on whether a given unit is worth summoning for.
A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that affects the decisions and judgments that people make. This can lead to poor judgment and biased thinking. As such, these biases can affect how we judge and analyse units and squads in Brave Frontier. The cognitive biases I am covering are also largely applicable outside of Brave Frontier so I hope this will be a worthwhile read for the whole community.

1. Distinction Bias

The tendency to view two options as more distinctive when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
When 2 subjects are compared side by side, they are often considered more dissimilar than they actually are. Distinction bias can magnify small differences between 2 similar units and can even be decisive factor in whether a player pulls for a unit.
For example, a player with Krantz as his main mitigator will probably be very satisfied with Krantz, but when a Stein rateup gate is released, he might be prompted to compare Krantz and Stein side by side and point out that Stein has important buffs on his SP options such as BC fill when attacked and status ailment negation, which makes Stein a much more attractive mitigator that he should pull for, and hence overrate Stein by comparing him to Krantz and listing out buffs that Stein has but Krantz does not. In actuality, a player with Krantz alone will most likely not require Stein as they accomplish very similar roles (2 turn mitigation, burst healing, etc.) and Krantz has his own unique buffs and traits such as BC/HC droprate, stats from his extra skill and cheap BB costs that make him a good mitigator in his own right.
We can compensate for this by reminding ourselves to evaluate a unit on its own. When juxtaposing a unit with another similar unit, take into consideration that distinction bias exists and avoid blowing up small differences in their kits which would otherwise be unnoticeable if not compared simultaneously.

2. Conservatism Bias

The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.
This is a problem that many of us do not realize. It is easier to hold on to an old belief and simply tweak it slightly (or not at all) when new information is released which disputes that original notion.
For a long time, the community believed that using Double Avant leads for Frontier Hunter were the best for getting the highest damage numbers, even when UBB-ing. However, after alternative setups that were not using Avants were discovered (some by yours truly), many players refused to believe that it was possible, because Avant's leader skill provided so much damage.
By having a more open mind towards opinions or strategies that have merit but contradict what we know, we can learn better and faster by being more accepting of the fact that sometimes, our view of the metagame and the best squads and units available might not be the most optimal.

3. Selective Perception

The tendency to allow our expectations to influence perception.
We tend to see what we want or expect to see and overlook stimuli which contradicts our beliefs or expectations.
When we build squads for any sort of content in Brave Frontier, we are hoping that they work out well. As such, we tend to focus on evidence that confirms that they are great squads, while dismissing information that point out their flaws.
I have two friends who were discussing Endless FG squads a while back, and both of them created squads that each had their unique characteristics. However, the discussion became heated when they began criticizing each other's squads and pinpointing how the squad that the other theorized would fail to reach stage 300. Neither person wanted the other to be nitpicking the flaws of the squad that they took time to theorize.
As much as we like our expectations to be affirmed, we should be aware that we are looking through rose-tinted glasses very often, and take those glasses off to seriously consider the blind spots or shortcomings.

4. Anchoring Bias

The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions.
When new unit information is released, players tend to over-rely on the first unit analysis post or video that they see as those will usually be their main reference points.
While it is fine to agree with what is covered in unit analysis threads/videos and use the information to help you decide whether to pull for a unit, what content the unit excels in and what SP builds to go for, they should not be the be-all and end-all of information.
It is a good practice to forge your own opinions on a new unit first, before reading the unit analysis posts or videos. You might find something new that others have not considered which you might not have realized if you relied solely on those outlets for unit analysis.

5. Availability Cascade

A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains increasing plausibility through its rising repetition in public discourse.
We are constantly relying on the Internet for information on just about anything. We rely on this subreddit for much of our information on Brave Frontier. The problem arises when the original information is incorrect or has loopholes that have not been addressed but continues to spread, with more players that receive this erroneous information simply repeating and spreading it, hence "validating" it and making the information difficult to challenge.
Such was the case for Ciara's supposed lack of viability in FH or FG1 squads. When OE Ciara was released, a few players were quick to pick up on the fact that Ciara's buffs were delayed due to her animation which killed her use in 0 ms delay squads. Some players began saying that Ciara was unusable for nuke squads, and this information quickly spread.
I decided to do some testing for UBB nuke squads utilizing Ciara and found that with appropriate ms delay timings, she could activate her buffs for the entire squad and squad damage was decent. D3monicUnicorn made a post about utilizing Ciara in an autobattle nuke squad for FH and FG1. So were they all wrong? Or were we wrong?
The most likely answer is that the players who originally labelled Ciara as garbage for any kind of nuke squad (not only for 0 ms) did not explore or entertain the concept of non 0 ms sequences, and more people just repeated the original sentiment.
Common knowledge might not always be correct. When your findings contradict the popular opinion, you are not always going against a horde of players, it might very well be the opinion from a few players that were repeated over and over.

6. Gambler's Fallacy

The tendency to believe that the onset of a certain random event is less likely to happen following an event or a series of events.
This last one does not pertain to unit analysis or squadbuilding but I figured I would cover it anyway.
Sometimes we love gacha, and sometimes we hate gacha. But one very common sentiment that players experience when summoning is the urge to summon 1 more time after a series of failed summons, hoping that the probability of them pulling the unit they want in the subsequent summon will be higher than the last because they had failed to pull the unit. As we all know, each summon gacha is an independent event (assuming gates with x10 rates are at x10 rates already) so past summons have no bearing on future summons.
On this note, perhaps x10 rateup summon gates were designed to prey on the gambler's fallacy, but that is another post for another day.

Closing Thoughts

While Brave Frontier is mostly a PvE game with few "competitive" events, we can still be better informed players by being aware of these cognitive biases that affect our knowledge and game sense. They are also good to know as they all have real life applications. Hopefully this article was helpful to you in some way. I would appreciate conducive discussion regarding the points that I raised and any other related topics. Cheers!

I thought I was done with limerence in my teens. But this past September,
I fell into an episode so intense that it completely messed up my life for
the next nine months.

Long story short, this guy was an acquaintance of mine that I knew in
passing. We both participate in the same hobby. I always thought he was
attractive and seemed interesting, but had no feelings for him. Until one
night, when I told him about the tough time I was going through, and he
empathized me on a level that no one else had and told me I had a right to
feel that way. That's how it began.

Since then, I've had many, many ups and downs. Many times I've thought I
was over him, only to get sucked back in later. But lately, I'm pretty
positive I'm done for good, and I'll explain why and why I believe this
spiraled out of control in the first place.

--

HOW DID I GET INTO THIS MESS?

Realizing how I got into this mess was a useful step to getting out of it.
Especially when I really broke the situation down and realized that he was
not some super special person-- he was just some guy in the right
situation at the right time.

I mean, look at these factors:

I was going through a crisis where I was living with Mom and Dad, had a

lonely work-from-home job, and my driving PTSD was too bad to leave town.

Because of this, I didn't have the self-confidence to pursue a

relationship.

This guy was dealing with a traumatic event that I thought meant he

wasn't in the proper headspace to date, either. (But I thought wrong!)

This guy was also successful and I felt he wouldn't want to date me

until I got my shit together.

So, therefore, I could obsess over him until I got my shit together and

he processed his traumatic event, and then I could tell him I liked him
and we could date.

Because of all these roadblocks, my little crush spiraled into an out-
and-out limerent episode. He was the only exciting thing in my boring
little life.

--

STUPID BRAIN

This guy would compliment me and flirt with me when we hung out together,
but he would often flake on plans and respond curtly to my messages (and
hardly ever messaged first.) We were part of a group chat, and sometimes
the guy would be active, sometimes not. He was often "very busy with
work," but when he wasn't, he was very affectionate.

So I fell into the cycle of what B. F. Skinner calls "intermittent
reinforcement." Also known as the most powerful motivator on the planet.
From an article about intermittent reinforcement:

"It was discovered that if you want to train an animal to do something,
consistently rewarding that behavior isn’t the best way. The most
effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only
sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained with an
intermittent reinforcement schedule, work harder for their rewards, and
take longer to give up once all rewards for the behavior is removed. This
is because even though the rewarding has stopped, the animal has gotten
used to performing the behavior and not always getting the reward. The
next time might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there’s
never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether."
https://medicaladvice.knoji.com/intermittent-reinforcement-are-you-
addicted-to-email-and-smartphones/

I was like a gambler at a slot machine, waiting for the next reward to
drop. Stuck on every little crumb of attention he'd give me. Sucks for me,
because, according to another article, "when pleasure is predictable, our
reward circuits become accustomed to it and our brain actually releases
less dopamine over time when with a consistently good partner. It could be
argued that in many cases, rejection and chaos by a toxic partner creates
an addiction that is far more long-lasting than the predictable quality of
“stable” love."
https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2017/11/this-powerful-
manipulation-method-keeps-you-bonded-to-your-abuse

So, when the love is less stable and the crumbs of affection are less
frequent, your brain gets MORE hooked. Great, just great. Also, the sunk
cost fallacy is a thing.

It helped to know that it wasn't just me, that I wasn't weak-minded. This
is just how your jerk brain will react whenever you experience
intermittent attraction-- it gets more and more attached.

Now that I know what's up, I can watch for it in the future.

I used to think that this kind of "love" was the best kind of love. "Love"
was supposed to make you feel wild and crazy and do crazy things and you
were supposed to be obsessed with the other person. Like in the movies.
But none of my serious relationships were like that, and I thought there
was something wrong. There wasn't. I was just experiencing a normal,
healthy attachment, as opposed to my limerent episodes when I felt intense
and out of control.

--

NO REGRETS

I wound up telling him how I felt one night, before I got my shit
together. I just couldn't play this roller-coaster game anymore, not
knowing for sure how he truly felt.

He told me he was dating someone else.

I was completely blindsided, and for the next few months, I was full of
regret, wishing I'd told him sooner. But that brings me to my first step
in getting over my limerence:

>> Realizing that there was nothing I could have done to get him to like
me. If he could have been mine, he would have.

He'd known I had liked him the whole time. He told me that. So if he
wanted me, he would have done more to make his intentions clear. He was
always lukewarm, flirting with me in the moment but not responding to
anything when we weren't in the same room. He just enjoyed the attention.
And yes, guys, when a woman is really into you, they will make moves and
make their intentions known. Don't kid yourselves and blame your lukewarm
LO on gender roles.

--

SELF-AWARENESS

I asked myself these questions:

>> What is it about him that attracts me? Are the qualities he embodies
something I can give to myself/ get from platonic friends?

>> What do I get out of this limerence? (An escape from my own problems?
Escape from boredom? Excuses to not be/do better in my own life because
I'm afraid of success? Scarcity mindset? Fear of loneliness? Wanting to
feel "right" or justified? Feeling like limerence is my identity and it's
comfortable?)

The answers to those questions helped me realize this dude was not special
and that I could take matters into my own hands to give myself the things
I needed.

--

AVOID AVOID AVOID

People talk on here about physically avoiding LO, but I would recommend
mentally avoiding LO, too.

Why?

Your brain doesn't know if you've actually seen LO or not. If you visit
their social media or reread diary entries, it will act like it's seen
that person.

"If elements of the trauma are replayed again and again, the accompanying
stress hormones engrave those memories ever more deeply in the mind.
Ordinary, day-to-day events become much less compelling. Not being able to
deeply take in what is going on around them makes it impossible to feel
fully alive. It becomes harder to feel the joys and aggravations of
ordinary life, harder to concentrate on the tasks at hand. Not being fully
alive in the present keeps them more firmly imprisoned in the past." --
Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD

-- "Traditional psychology is based around the idea that you can spend
week after week talking about trauma and make improvements. In my
experience (and from the other therapists who've confided in me) this
rarely leads to healing. It leaves the client and the therapist stuck and
defeated.
Trauma alters the brain. Thinking and talking about trauma solidifies the
pathways of the brain. Continuing to talk about this for years or decades
only makes these pathways stronger. It's my belief that this is how trauma
becomes an identity. Wrapped up in who we are, releasing it becomes next
to impossible even if we deeply believe this is what we want to achieve.
Our brains are neuroplastic. Thoughts and lived experiences change the
brain physically." -- Nicole LePera, @the.holistic.psychologist

Try to think about other things, (but be gentle with yourself, shame
doesn't help, and your brain is not on your side.) Stay off
facebook/instagram, stay out of past diary entries. Do other interesting
things. Put podcasts/tv on all the time to distract from thoughts.

If you keep going back to certain amusing anecdotes that you like to
retell about you and LO, think of some different anecdotes. Or if you have
certain memories you like to replay all the time, replay some other
memories, or get super invested in a TV show where you can get absorbed in
the characters' lives.

--

BIOHACKS

Pretty much, you need to calm down your cortisol so you can give your
serotonin a fighting chance.

"Levels of the stress hormone cortisol increase during the initial phase
of romantic love, marshaling our bodies to cope with the “crisis” at hand.
As cortisol levels rise, levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin become
depleted. Low levels of serotonin precipitate what Schwartz described as
the “intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early
love”—the obsessive-compulsive behaviors associated with infatuation."
https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-mahoney-neuroscience-
institute/brain-newsletteand-brain-series/love-and-brain

Classic recommendations you've seen 1000 times: exercise. It works.

For me, taking zinc orotate has helped me out a lot. For the first time in
a long time, situations that would stress me out calm me down. YMMV.

Here's a large article about all the things you can try:
https://selfhacked.com/blog/factors-counteract-stress-response/

--

HOW YOU KNOW YOU'RE DONE

When you can confidently say this:

"I will never date him. Never. Ever.
And I don't ever want to date him. I will never give him a chance, even if
he asks."

Unless you can say "never," you are not over your limerence. If there is
any part of you holding out hope, or wishing he would ask you out so you
have convinced him of your value and then you can call him out for
treating you badly... if you even want to get the last word... you are not
over your limerence. If you want anything from him at all, you are not
over your limerence.

Try not to see LO until you can confidently say "never." Good encounter,
bad encounter, you'll be thinking and obsessing over how good/bad they are
for you, and so you're thinking about them again. Yes, even if it went
badly, the "dodged a bullet" feeling will eventually lead, yet again, to
"he's going through a rough time..." If he has a significant other, you
will convince yourself he's not really that into her and he'll leave her
soon. Anything to make your little story work. Also, your shame drive is
turned up so you will probably feel like you did something wrong no matter
what you did. But it's not you. It's your LO shutting their eyes to the
potential inside you.

Hello guys, so I started playing a couple of weeks ago and joined this subreddit and have been having a blast playing the game. On the other hand, now that the DF starting day is gone, and by reading so many new threads, clearly we have all kinds of ages and education background playing the game, but I think it's really important to clarify some relevant information that'll reduce (I hope) some of the new threads.
First topic: Drop Rates
There are so many threads created talking about the drop rates being shit and such, and a lot of conspiracy theories about Klab and whatnot. This arguably happens in every gacha subreddit and stems from a lack of insight / info of how these games work. The gacha component works with your instincts in an almost identic way to gambling, that's why there's still so much controversy about loot boxes in the most recent videogames.
It's very simple, it you buy a ticket to the lottery, when the prize is being drawn, you feel the rush and when it is announced you either feel really sad or if you win, there's nothing like it! King of the world, yada yada. Why? Because the odds were low. That's why we love that rush, to get something no one else got with such a little chance.
In this gacha (as in most actually, since in some countries it's now obligated by law to disclose probabilities in these kinds of games and also in loot boxes) you have the probabilites laid out. What does a 0,557% probability of getting DF Nitta mean? It means that in every pull you make, you have 99.443% of getting something else. And that happens -every- time you do a pull, it does not accumulate, nothing changes that fact. There's something called The Gambler's Fallacy (if you want to read more, check Gambler's Fallacy) that is pretty much what happens here. You think that by pulling trash SRs more and more will make it more likely to get that DF - not true at all. Mathwise and ingame, the probability is -always- the same - really really low. So for someone to -never- pull a DF character in a Dream Festival since the game begun is not unlikely, it's just unlucky. It's not Klab's fault at all, this is just a machine spewing out random numbers.
TL:DR:
- The game is -not- rigged. It's working exactly as intended. It's a chance game, a gambling game. You can pull one multi and get 10 SSRs, and you can pull 10 multis with 0 SSRs, both are very much possible (although not likely to happen, especially the first). No conspiracy, it's just how math and random generated numbers work. Also, you pulling more and more does NOT make it more likely to drop something you want. The odds are exactly the same, every time.
Second topic: Gaming Mindset
Also many threads (and in other gacha subreddits, too) about "this game ruined my life" "I Quit! Fuck you Klab/Nintendo/Bandai". This a different topic altogether, but has a clear link to the gambling component of the game.
First of all, no game "ruins your life", pretty much as no drug ruins your life or no gun ruins your life. It's the humans that allow stuff do that to themselves. This can sound a bit depressing, but it is true. What these games intentionally do is play with our emotions/moods/mindsets and get us addicted. Addicted to getting that max power level, that SSR, that gear in WoW, that rank in csgo/LoL/dota/whatever. It's up to us to deal with that and prevent it for taking up our lives. I've always been a gamer, thousands of hours into many many games, but I always worry about maintaining a sane equilibrium: I exercise everyday, I spend a lot of time with friends, family, go to the movies, beach, whatever.
There are also people that are more prone to addiction, and if you are such, you definitely should not be playing these kinds of games because you are more likely to fall into that kind of behaviours, I won't go into psychological remarks because I have no education on that area.
I can only share my experience and advice - in this game, when I started to play I read a lot, checked the probabilities of drops and stuff and went "Ok, got it. This is pure luck, I'm gonna f2p because 1- I love Tsubasa since I was a kid and it seems fun 2- I don't find it worthy to spend money in this, even if being competitive will be definitely hard". So I rolled during last DC and got Espadas, with garbage other SSRs, but I didn't care, having a good GK seemed a good start. From then on I've been enjoying the game a LOT, even getting dupes from tickets for all the SSR I had in the first week lol. And when DF came I had 500 DBs, so I said "Gonna spend 300 and save 200 for WC." And started pulling with the mindset of "I'm not getting anything good." - lowering my own expectations. When I got to 200 I stopped and felt lucky with what I got. I'm not saying that I'm better than anyone, I also get sad when I get nothing and get really happy when I do, but I know and deal with that frustration / happy rush, and it's all fun, because in the end, it's only a game.
TL:DR
- These games are, by design, created to play with our emotions to a high degree of frustration / achievement. Something that helps a lot is lowering expectations instead of hyping them up. The odds of getting what we want are so very extremely low, so just go into it thinking "Yeah I'm not getting what I want" and be happy if you get anything, not the other way around. Enjoy the story, the game modes, the grind, etc.
In the end, it really is just a game, if you feel bad most of the time playing it, stop and do/play something else. If it makes you feel good most of the time, keep playing.

For context, see my previous post.
Listening to knowledgable people discuss FPL can be very helpful in filling gaps in matches you missed, and can keep your knees holding firm. But there are dozens of FPL podcasts, and most of them are over an hour long. It’s impossible for any of us to listen to all of them. Or is it?
Yes, usually it is. But each week I spend about 15 hours walking the dog, taking the bus, and walking to work, and while I do that, I listen to podcasts. Usually I listen to one or two FPL podcasts, and lots of politics podcasts. This week, I decided to listen only to FPL-relevant podcasts. So in the last 8 days I listened to 22 FPL and PL podcasts that aired between GW5 and GW6. My original intent was to rank them, but that proved to be too difficult. How could I compare the third one I listened to to the 9th one I listened to? So instead, I’ve given them letter grades. I took notes while listening to each episode, and assigned the grade at the end of that episode.
A note on the methodology. I don’t know everyone’s interests — just my own. But I know one interest that we share -- the one that brings us together here -- and that’s FPL. So these rankings are purely from an FPL standpoint. You may also be interested in chess, or Serie A, but I will only grade the podcasts insofar as they relate to FPL. Furthermore, I will only try my best to grade them as they relate to FPL in general, and not my team in particular.
Without further ado, the grades. (I'm American.)
Edit: I will listen to the post-GW5 episodes of !FF Surgery and Football Ramble tomorrow and add them to the list.
Premier League Podcasts:
Totally Football. A-. Very similar format to The Guardian, but in their coverage of matches they talk a lot more about individual performances than just the team performances. They also talk about formations and which players benefit most from the way the team is playing.
Football Weekly - The Guardian. B+. They spend a lot of time talking about off-the-field issues with teams. Only the first half-hour is premier league; they also do championship, even some lower leagues, and basically every league in Europe. It’s great football stuff, but not at all helpful for fantasy. Side note: I am a big fan of Barry Glendenning.
The Game. C. Again a similar format to the above, but the PL content is interspersed with other content. And they focus on issues like handshake-gate and Neymar-Cavani more than team performance or individual performance.
Men in Blazers. D. The first 12 minutes – – 20% space – – was about baldness. Then they say the results of the previous week's matches and make jokes about them. Some decent moments, but usually off-topic. Last ten minutes are MLS.
FPL Podcasts:
3 Amigos. A. This one was the most surprisingly good, given that I hadn't heard of it. The first ten minutes is just their teams and mini league. They go through the upcoming GW's matches as a springboard for talking about who to bring in. There is definitely more in-depth analysis than a lot of other podcasts, including value and fixtures and underlying stats. They go into xG and xA and upcoming fixtures and how teams will likely set up against their upcoming opposition.
FML FPL. A. The talk about their teams and sponsors is short and sweet. They analyze teams and games with a specific eye to players and their potential for FPL. And there's some great FPL theory interwoven -- optimal lineup, where to spend money, etc.
Fantasy Football Scoutcast. A-. They start by talking about how many points they got last week and who on their teams got those points. But rather than just citing the facts, they use it to talk about why they picked those players and what they think of them going forward. Then they transition to specific segments; this week was Aguero v Kane, mid-priced mids, best value defenders, and bonus magnets. Really interesting stuff, and quite different. Lots of stats, and lots of sensitivity to FPL concerns like price. This is the podcast that seems to have the highest overall knowledge; most of the others have one person who seems to know a lot more than the other or the rest.
Tinker Men. B+. They started with who played/didn't midweek. Then they compared players using underlying stats. The usual talk about who to captain, who to bring in, punt, clean sheet, best wing backs. In addition they have a "red list"; most likely to get a red card (Cabaye and Arnautovic). Good, short, well done, no wasted time, some interesting and different things.
Just Offside. B+. Really pleasant guys, some statistical analysis. Lots of answering of questions from Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; not super in-depth answers, but that's what you get when they answer basically all of them. You can skip the last 10 minutes when they start running down the top 10 of their mini league.
Who Got the Assist?. B+. Two positive guys that talk a bit about their teams, cover the previous week's matches, and discuss potential moves -- usually in the context of their own teams, but often branching out. They do two interesting unique features: psychology corner, which discusses various psychological notions that are relevant to playing FPL (this week: Gambler's Fallacy), and market watch, which it seems looks at who is being dropped for whom.
Always Cheating. B. They spend a lot of time (15 minutes!) talking about their teams -- who they brought in and how their former teams did. Then they do their mini-league. Then they go over a few concepts, like what to do about Manchester City, best defense, expensive flops and what to do about them. I would have liked interesting theory, like how much to spend on your defense, how to spread that money around; but instead they just talk about good defenders to have.
The DANalysis. B-. Three people, pretty poor production (echoey). They go through the matches, and talk about who to pick/avoid from each match. Not much new. It seems like only one guy actually contributes content; the others interject questions, but don't offer much positively.
Four Point Hit. C. Sounds like it was record on an iPhone in a bathroom with four guys sitting around it. Starts with what they were right and wrong about, which isn't really helpful. Decent analysis, but out-of-date one week later because it's only recorded once a month. I'd love to grab a beer and talk FPL with these guys, but I don't get much from the podcast.
AUSFPL. C. This is mostly just an analysis of the previous GW's matches, and predictions for the upcoming week. Very little talk of anything specifically FPL. When it is, it's in passing with no support. Like, "Ritchie looks good at his price".
12th Man. C. The first 12 minutes, 1/3 of the podcast, is about some game they're playing with stickers. No idea what it is, but it involves players from the 90s. The rest is going through the previous week's matches and commenting on them. This week contained a pretty interesting analysis of Liverpool. But not much in it for fantasy.
Fantasy Soccer FC. C. They go through last week's games and offer a pretty surface level analysis of the teams, only occasionally bringing up players and even less often fantasy discussion. I turned it off with 20 minutes ago because I couldn't stand the cohosts yelling usually about how he cant take trust injury reports.
Association Fantasy Football Cast United. C. Starts with 10 minutes or so of banter unrelated to football. Then they transition into their own teams. Not much new or helpful.
Shirts v Skins. C-. Worst production quality by far; I had to crank the volume all the way up and it still sounded like it was in a tin can. They spend the first half recapping last weeks results in the second half talking about the upcoming fixtures. Things really go off the rails when they stop talking about last week's fixtures. In the middle, they just talk about random things and interrupt each other a lot for 10 minutes or so. They are the only podcast who are still encouraging people to pick up Hegazi, which makes me question their knowledge.
The Gaffer Tapes. C-. Three guys, one of whom has been gone for a while. The main host sounds exactly like David Brent, including his vocal inflection and the sense of humour. They had a guest who works at man city and plays FPL, but, while interesting, her contributions were not about man city players fantasy prospects nor really helpful for fantasy in general.
Fantasy Fat Cats. D. This podcast started by calling Vardy racist and Neymar's sister hot. Lots of anger and swearing; they sound like they just discovered curse words and are trying to use them as often as they can. For player recommendations to pick up, they just give names -- not much evidence provided for any of their recommendations. They don't really talk about players. Mostly they name a previous match and then make crass jokes about it.
Waiting on the Bonus Points. D. The first 15 minutes are the head to head between two of the hosts. The next 10 minutes is the consequences for each of them (they tied); one had to invite people to an FPL party in the bathroom, the other had to eat something spicy. Mildly entertaining, but not at all helpful. Then some decent overall analysis. Poor production value; lots of echoes.
Gameweek. F. Very high production value. Lots of musical cuts and such. But it's hard to imagine a worse FPL podcast. They talk over each other constantly, go on wild tangents, discuss their teams, and then cover which players did well. One of the guys apparently didn't realize the deadline was Friday, so you don't get the sense they do much research.
The Game Podcast (The Times). F. Supposedly about FPL. The guys constantly talk over each other to the point that you want to smash your phone on the ground to get just one of them to shut up. No real analysis or news; they basically just cover who did well and who didn't the previous week, which one learns just by logging in to the site.
Which ones will I keep listening to?
Always Cheating is the only FPL podcast that is out by 8am Eastern on Monday; so I'll listen to Football Weekly, Totally Football and Always Cheating while I walk the dog Monday morning. Every other podcast references (or uses ideas/stats from without referencing) FFScoutcast, so I'll keep listening to that; unfortunately the podcast comes out on Thursdays, which is pretty late in the week for impact. (I think the youtube videos come out earlier.) 3 Amigos is the best bang-for-your-buck; tons of stats and such thrown at you in a short time, so I'll listen to that on Tuesday. FML FPL, Who Got the Assist?, and Just Offside will round out my weekly listening, with one of them maybe making way in weeks where there are other things to listen to. And I'll check out Four Point Hit once a month when it comes out, if I can get to it that week.
Finally, a bonus feature. Tips for FPL podcasters.

Don't ever, ever interrupt each other.
Don't discuss at length your own team. New listeners don't care.
Don't constantly complain. Be positive!
Don't use the same format and/or regurgitate the same talking points that every other podcast is doing.
Do have a consistent theme or outline, with segments.
Do bring up things that not everyone knows. WE KNOW BEN DAVIES DIDN'T PLAY!
Do something new. Something that sets you apart. But that is relevant to FPL.
DO talk about FPL theory. Everyone has the same views about, say, Ritchie's prospects. But views on how much your third mid should cost, the principles that help decide who to captain, when to use your transfer and the importance of team value, should you have a 4.0 defender, when should you wildcard... That's the stuff that differs among people, and an interesting and well-argued take on these questions will keep people coming back.

Hey folks how ya doing.
Okay, so today we're going to go over tips and tricks to spot agent provocateur tactics, the importance of reviewing post history, and some key rules to remember when engaging with opposing viewpoints of questionable integrity.
First of all, let's differentiate between Trolling and Shilling. A lot of people will say they are the same thing out of ignorance. That's not to say that someone who equates the two is stupid, just uninformed as to the real relation between the terms.
So let's get started.
PART ONE: TROLLS
We'll kick this off with a definition:
Troll (informal): make a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.
Trolling is, at its core, a morally bankrupt activity. Regardless of belief in the content of the message, trying to Troll someone is primarily an attempt to elicit a negative response out of someone else. As such, Trolling comes in many forms, and usually commit a fallacy of some kind.
Some Trolls are more subtle than others. On one end of the spectrum is the Low-Effort Troll, trying to get a rise out of someone purely through Personal Attacks, Imitation-Baiting, Excessive use of Sarcasm/Questioning/Italics, etc. These Trolls are easy to spot.
On the other hand, the High-Effort Troll will incorporate sneakiness: Feigned Agreement, Appeal to Authority and Undermining Tactics. A Troll that starts out agreeing with you will be harder to spot, and often will hook their target deeply into discussion before they realize they are being trolled. A lot of High-Effort Trolling tactics involve the ambiguity of emotional load that comes with conversing entirely through the written word: Always remember that words and sentences can have multiple meanings depending on inflection, and if you are in doubt about the sincerity of a comment, always try speaking it out loud a few times with different levels of implied sarcasm in your voice. If it seems like the argument could turn against you easily, be cautious.
So how do you fight a Troll? It's simple: you don't. The Troll is there specifically to fight. By engaging him, you ensure his victory. Your argument may be airtight, you might bring all the evidence you need to convince any rational person. The Troll doesn't care, he's already made you waste your time and gotten a rise out of you. So remember the cardinal rule of internet discourse: DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
PART TWO: SHILLS
Time for another definition. This one is a little older, and not directly relevant to Shilling on the Internet, but I picked it because it exposes the core deceit at play:
Shill (slang): a confidence trickster's assistant, esp a person who poses as an ordinary customer, gambler, etc, in order to entice others to participate.
The Shill is the guy on the street, beating the Huckster at Three-Card Monty, waving around a stack of twenties that he just won for everybody to see. If Trolling is a morally bankrupt activity, Shilling is moral corruption. The Shill may know they are in the wrong (and likely do), but does not care as long as they make money. As a result, Shilling is a higher art-form than Trolling. While the Troll can skate by on base insults or sarcasm, the Shill must be a seasoned debater, be able to argue a position well, and must have the resources to debunk or otherwise undermine the position of their opponent. If they are a true Shill, they will be all of these things. After all, they are by definition paid for their services.
The most important distinction between a Shill and a Troll is a matter of targeting. Where you, the debater, is the target for a Troll, the Shill is targeting the audience, i.e. the random person who curiously stumbles into the thread and doesn't know what to think about the subject at hand. The Shill isn't paid to enrage the skeptic, he is paid to influence the debate.
The effective Shill will have their own method of undermining an argument, but will generally use one of three methods. They are all effective if executed well, and are all psychological in nature.

The Professor: This tactic attempts to present the Shill as the rational, intelligent side of the argument. He will seem to take the moral and logical high ground. His verbosity will only be matched by the scalpel-like precision with which he wields it. He will refer you to mainstream news articles proving his point. This is a very effective method, because to the average curious person he will seem legitimately intelligent. Luckily, it's implementation requires a dedicated and well-read individual to pull off, and is not seen as often as others. Unfortunately, when it does turn up, it is often nearly indistinguishable from a genuine engaged commenter presenting his viewpoint. Because of this, accusing The Professor of Shilling should be a last resort: If you can secure a genuine victory through continued debate, it is much preferred to calling him out.
The Saboteur: Similar in rhetoric to High-Effort Trolling, but decidedly more sophisticated. The Saboteur will take your side of the argument and blow it so far out of proportion it loses credibility with anybody who isn't already a part of the debate. A classic example is the "missile plane" theory found fairly frequently in 9/11 skeptic circles, i.e. "the planes were cruise missiles mocked up to look like planes." This is of course absurd, as the impacts in no way resemble cruise missile explosions. But it is close enough to the "drone flights" theory (in contrast, a much sounder argument) to be linked in the minds of an uninformed reader, and therefore the former theory reduces the credibility of the latter. This is an easier tactic to combat, but requires long-winded responses that thoroughly deconstruct the issue at hand.
The Incredulous Bystander: This method of Shilling is the most common of the three. The Shill comes into a debate in progress, and commits the Fallacy of Personal Incredulity ad nauseum. "I'm sorry, I just can't accept that [abc] is [xyz]. It's just impossible, there's no way." This will go on and on. No matter what you throw at him, he will come back with the same incredulity. The purpose is simple: make the poster look like their argument is too fantastical for the average person to agree with. Although it's very easy to defeat The Incredulous Bystander by simple logical arguments, be careful. You have to know when to disengage, or the sheer repetition will make your argument seem desperate. Make a final argument against their disingenuous bafflement early, within three replies if possible. Then disengage completely, even if they come back to try and lead you on some more.

Like I said, there are variations on each of these paradigms, and each Shill's methods will be different. More intelligent or better-equipped Shills will use dirty tactics (Vote Manipulation, Multiple Account Shilling, etc.). Sometimes the combined effort of a group of Shills or Shill Accounts can simply be too much to combat alone. In these cases, it's simply best to downvote and disengage. Not every battle can be won.
PART THREE: HOW TO I.D. A TROLL/SHILL ACCOUNT
Thanks to the (fairly) open nature of account creation and tracking on reddit, certain things can be learned about an account from the Account Overview Page. Patterns emerge in every account, regardless of if the account is an active Troll/Shill, or not. It is through the account's activity and past comments that one can glean insight into the intentions of an individual.
A Regular Poster will look something like the account I linked above, which is mine. Post history and comment content may be concentrated to certain subreddits and ideas at times, but will more likely be varied with little recognizable pattern. This is because the individual behind the account doesn't have an agenda beyond personal entertainment (or knowledge acquisition) on the site.
Since Trolling is an activity anybody with a chip on their shoulder can do, not every Troll will be a dedicated Troll Account. Sometimes, people Troll without realizing they're doing it. But there are some hallmarks to look out for: conspicuously high numbers of short, one- or two-sentence responses, a tendency to make every statement a question, abnormal distribution of comments (i.e. the last 50 comments in one thread), and excessive use of casual ridicule when responding to serious comments ("lolwat/get your head checked/wow you're stupid", etc). Additionally, another way to identify part-time Trolls and Flamers is to check their comment history for key subreddits. If somebody shows up and says something questionably racist, derogatory or inflammatory, look for subreddits that might be indicative of that account holder's moral leanings (for example, posts to /whiterights, /greatapes and /ZOG are all good indicators that the poster is racist. Call them out on it!).
A Shill Account will look decidedly different, and might at first glance seem like a normal poster. But there are a couple of key identifiers that can help you form your opinion on the intentions of the account holder:
Karma Authority and Perceived Age: Shills go through accounts like cigarettes. Once a Shill account is identified as such, it is nearly useless for anything except vote manipulation. And reddit's mods (at least, the good ones) have gotten pretty good at identifying accounts that break site rules. This is especially true for /conspiracy and a few related subs. So Shills are often stuck using extremely young accounts with very little commentary added to the site as a whole. These accounts have very little authority with the more skeptical member of the audience smart enough to look at the account history. Seeing zero karma, an age measured in days instead of months, and less than a page of posts doesn't invoke trust in that account's opinion. So Shill accounts will be "aged": The account will be created, one post (or a few) will be made, and that post's karma will be manipulated by the Shill's other accounts, just enough to get the karma up around 150~200. The account will then be left untouched for anywhere between 4 months and a year. Once this period of time is up, the account is brought back to life and the Shill starts posting. Now, the less-thorough reader will see an account that is 7 months old, has 80 link and 225 comment karma, and looks to be active. If they scroll to the bottom of the comment history, they would see that it's a fake set up to look that way, but most people won't. Always check for Perceived Age. If the history goes beyond 20 pages of comments, chances are good the account is legit.
Defense Of The Tyrant: Thanks to the paid nature of their job, the Shill will not advocate reasonable positions. They are specifically here to lessen the impact of questionable material, undermine the opposition to negative aspects of the Status Quo, and make skeptics and activists look bad. The most current example is the rampant Shilling for the Police found in nearly every thread that covers Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Police Brutality or related issues. It is not a popular opinion to defend tyranny, and yet for every post condemning police violence, there is another apologist (or downright authoritarian) comment accusing any protest of undermining the authority of the stewards of public safety. Some of these are regular (if horribly misguided) posters. But it is absolutely an indicator of Shilling, and if you see it combined with other indicators, there is a good chance they were paid to skew the conversation further towards confusion, vitriol, animosity and gridlock.
"Deadly Serious": As has been previously stated, the Shill has a specific goal of making their argument look better than another. In this regard, they will use every tool they have to undermine their opponent. One logical fallacy is commonly used: Appeal to Emotion, AKA The "Deadly Serious" argument. When you appeal to emotion, you are attempting to scare the audience into reactive thinking. "Harassing Police is Deadly Serious" is a good example. You inject the fear of personal safety into the conversation: "What if the cops just quit? Rampant crime! I don't want to have to fear for myself and my children! I don't like it, but this guy has a point." It's a fallacy because emotion is irrational. The reality is there is a problem in this country, and whether or not police will "put up with" protesting is completely unrelated to the actual issue of the creeping authoritarianism plaguing law enforcement throughout America. Again, anybody can Appeal to Emotion accidentally, but if you see it over and over again in the account history, it's most likely deliberate abuse of the fallacy.
PART FOUR: BEST PRACTICES FOR FIGHTING SHILLS
So, you've identified a Shill. You've decided not to put up with it. What do you do?
First of all, keep calm. Engaging in heated debate makes both sides of the argument seem irrational, to your detriment. The Shill doesn't have to look good, he just has to make you look bad, or without that, make the debate so incomprehensibly vitriolic that the audience decides to leave and do something else. By making your case logically, rationally, and without emotional attachment or useless insults, you will come off as logical, rational, informed, and respectable.
Second: Debate the Topic primarily, not the Opposition. Attacks on Authority and Integrity are useful only once Authority and Integrity are in doubt. Until then (or if you are up against The Professor), you are just giving the Shill more ammo to use against you. Stay on topic, don't get lost in semantics and nitpicking, state your case simply. If you do things right, most Shills will give up before you.
Third: Karma is Useless. Ever since reddit changed the voting scheme there has been absolutely no point to tracking Karma as an indicator of winning a conversation or not. Brigading is absolutely a problem whether or not the mods acknowledge it, and chances are good your posts will be net negative, even if you are clearly winning your argument. Don't let it get to you! It's an imaginary number that is easily skewed.
I'm pretty close to character limit at this point, so I figure it's about time to stop this train. Comments, Questions, anything is welcome. This is a rough outline of my own experiences with logic and debate in the treacherous semantic waters we swim in, and is by no means complete. Take these ideas and interpret them, expand on them, make them your own. Then spread it where you can. Any commenter can be a strong debater, if they know the pitfalls and traps that are set for them.
Oh, almost forgot. This post is also an open invitation to any Ex-Shills that want to share their knowledge.
Remember folks, Stay Skeptical.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170912011148/reddit.com/digital_manipulation

Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment. They’re usually studied in psychology and economics, but some of them apply to our everyday life, including testing and playing Magic: the Gathering. In today’s article I’ll talk about 8 cognitive biases, how they’re making you worse at Magic, and what you can do to compensate for them. Some of the time there’s nothing you can do other than simply not acting on the bias, but the mere fact that you’re aware it exists should help you identify when it’s happening.
Keep in mind that this is just an area that interests me, and I am not an authority on the subject in any way. Ultimately this is an article about Magic, not about psychology. All the definitions come from Wikipedia.

1. Peak-End Rule

That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
As humans, we’re great at focusing on one aspect of what happened and letting it define the whole experience, and that aspect is generally either the peak or the end. It’s for this reason, for example, that going 0-2 7-0 feels great, whereas going 7-0 0-2 feels like you might as well drop, even if they are the exact same record.
When you’re testing a matchup, it’s very common for each side to have a widely different perspective. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of, “This matchup is great for me” and “I felt favored” reports from two different sides, which clearly can’t be the case. This happens because we fall prey to the peak-end rule, and it’s something we must correct if we want to have useful results in playtesting.
This happens even more when you’re testing an aggro versus control matchup. The aggro side will have some very easy wins, and it’ll think “wow, I crushed my opponent like there’s no tomorrow—this matchup is so easy.” The control side, however, will have some very complicated wins, and will remember the sweet games in which it was in complete control for half an hour. In the end, both sides will feel like the match is favorable because they are focusing on different things and letting that one moment define their whole experience.
The best way to fix this is to keep track of results. Keeping track will not give you a definitive answer (i.e., it’s not because you went 7-3 that the matchup is 70%), but it will help you identify when you’re being biased—if you think the matchup is favored but results indicate otherwise, then perhaps you should try to playtest more and get a second opinion. It will certainly stop you from thinking that control is favored every time simple because you spend more time winning than you do losing (guilty).

2. Gambler’s Fallacy

The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged.
Most people are familiar with the gambler’s fallacy, but we still fall prey to it from time to time. In MTG, it materializes when we apply past experiences of whether something worked or did not work out to decide whether it’s going to the next time, even if there should, in theory, be no relation.
For example, say that I keep a 1-lander that I believe is correct to keep, and I don’t draw my second land. Then, the following round, I keep a similar 1-lander, and I again don’t get there. By the third round, I’m more likely to mulligan a similar hand, because it’s already failed me twice, even though, if the hand is a good keep, then it’s a good keep regardless.
We also do this a lot with cards drawn by our opponent, by applying either “of course they’re going to have it again, they always have it” or “there’s no way they’re going to have it again,” when those probabilities shouldn’t really change—the fact that your opponent had the perfect card to stop you last game doesn’t influence whether they’re going to have the perfect card to stop you now.
The way to fix this is simply to stop doing it. Yeah, I know, that’s a bit tautological, but there’s no real way around it—you have to be aware of this bias and remove it. When you find yourself arriving at a conclusion based on past experiences that you suspect might be wrong, try to really think it through, and base your decisions on probability rather than those feelings.

3. Illusion of Control

The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.
In Magic, we’re taught that we must always learn from our losses to improve as players. While this is fundamentally true, it creates a culture in which individuals think they’re to blame every single time they lose, which is false. Whenever we lose, we assume we must have done something wrong, and we try to identify what it is. When we can’t, we either fabricate something, or we feel miserable. We do it because we want to think we have more control over the situation than we really do—if we do badly because we messed up, then it follows logically that if we don’t mess up, we’ll do well next time, and that’s comforting because it’s in our hands, and what’s in our hands we can fix.
The harsh reality is that we’re much less in control than we believe. Many of the times we lose, it’s not because we did something wrong—and many of the times we win, it’s not necessarily because we did something right. It’s for this reason that I dislike when I lose and someone asks me, “what happened?” (and my mother is particularly guilty of this) because it implies that for me to have lost, something “weird” had to have happened. Sometimes nothing happened, and you just lost because people lose. In our quest for self-improvement (or perhaps to appear like we’re trying to self-improve), we often create scenarios in which the conclusion is “I did something wrong, therefore I lost” when the conclusion should be “I just lost.”
One of the hardest parts of Magic is making the 55% choice ten times, getting it wrong ten times in a row, and still making the same choice the 11th time, but it’s what you must do—it’s not because a choice didn’t work out that it was wrong. “I should have mulliganed my 2-lander.” No, you shouldn’t have. You played the probabilities and lost. “I shouldn’t have played main-deck Doom Blade.” No, you should have. You were just unlucky to play against the 4 black players in the room.
Magic is a game where people lose all the time, and the sooner you accept that, the happier you will be and the easier you will be able to cope with your losses. The best players have a win percentage of about 65% at the PT level—this means that for every 3 games they play, they lose 1. And those are the best in history! Of course those players are far from perfect, but not even the perfect player would win close to all their matches.
If you want to be a competitive Magic player, you have to try to identify your flaws to improve yourself, absolutely, but you also have to be realistic. You have to accept that sometimes you lose and there is nothing you could have done, or nothing you should have done.

4. Outcome Bias

The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
This is similar to the illusion of control (and in fact there are examples in there that are just outcome bias), but I’ve decided to give them separate entries because I think they usually manifest in different ways. Illusion of control happens when you assume you must’ve done something wrong because you failed, and outcome bias happens when you assume you must’ve done something right because you succeeded. In Magic, this bias is commonly referred to as being “results oriented” (which actually has a different meaning in the outside world).
A while ago, I used to have articles in which I dissected decks that did well at events, and analyzed whether their card choices were improvements over the stock build's. I constantly read comments like “you’re saying X is bad, but how can it be bad if the person won?” The most glaring example was a person who took a 5-color control deck and cut 3 lands for 3 Violent Ultimatums, and then proceeded to win an event. Yes, you read that right. They played 3 fewer lands than the normal build, and 3 more 7-drops that required all specific mana. I said this was something you should never do mathematically, but I saw numerous replies suggesting that I was simply jealous of the person’s success with a different idea, and if he won the event, it was clearly because it worked and I should stop being so close-minded.
Another example of this happened when I wrote about a game in which I activated Depala multiple times, always sending a land I needed to the bottom, and eventually lost whereas if I had drawn a land at any time, I’d have won immediately. I was told by multiple people that perhaps I shouldn’t have used Depala, but clearly I should have as it’s statistically more likely that she helps me than not, even if in practice it did not help me.
In the end, we must understand that the 55% decision is just that—a decision that is going to be right 45% of the time. 45% is a lot. You will, invariably, be “proven right” if you make the wrong decision, but that doesn’t mean it magically becomes the right decision. If you follow a “it worked so it must be right” policy, then it will be much harder for you to improve as a player.

5. Insensitivity to Sample Size

The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
This is also a problem with playtesting. Simply put, we do not do anything enough times to draw powerful statistical conclusions from it. We can have “general ideas” and “educated guesses”, but we must understand that, the smaller our sample size, the larger the variance we expect, and the less “truthful” our results will be. As before, going 7-3 does not mean the matchup is 70%—it could even be unfavorable.
At some point in our testing house, we started to track results from Drafts so that we could see which colors overperformed and underperformed. At first I was against it because I thought we would be putting more weight into this information than we should, so it was better to not have the information at all. The sample size was so small, particularly for some fringe combinations, that it might as well not exist, and we were drawing big conclusions from very small data. Nowadays I think we’ve become a bit better at dealing with this information, so I’m in favor of tracking them again, but only because we know that insensitivity to sample size is a real thing and we account for it.
There are two ways to compensate for this bias. The first is to make your sample size larger (i.e., instead of playing 10 games, play 100 or 1000.) If you go 700-300, then the matchup is likely to be around 70%. In practice, this is usually not feasible, which leads to the second: Don’t playtest to know what happened, but to learn how or why it happened. What happened is an isolated occasion—it might happen differently in the future. If you understand what caused it to happen, though, you can better understand how likely it is to happen again, and you can then extrapolate big conclusions from a relatively small amount of data.

6. Selective Perception

The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
In simple terms, this is the bias where we see what we want to see or what we expect to see, and it’s most common in deck selection where decks start looking better because we created them or because the tournament is imminent.
When we make a deck, we’re hoping that it’ll be great. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be making it. As a result, we focus on the evidence that confirms it’s great, while ignoring the evidence that would make it seem bad. It’s common to read a tournament report that says, “went 4-3, but my 2 losses were due to mistakes. The deck is great,” but there’s often no mention of how many of your 4 wins were due to opposing mistakes, because that doesn’t validate your idea that the deck is good.
It also materializes when we don’t have a deck and the tournament is approaching. In this spot, we’re desperate—we feel awful because we don’t have a deck, and we really want one, so we’re more inclined to accept evidence that tells us a deck is good because this will make us feel better. The best fix for this is, again, to just be aware of it and try to compensate.
Last week I wrote about our G/W Tokens deck and how I decided to not play it because I thought people were being victims of selective perception—we had no deck and the tournament was the following day, so we ignored all of G/W’s flaws and focused on its good points, which made it seem appealing to everybody. By choosing not to play it, I was trying to compensate for our selection bias because I knew it existed.
Of course, in this example I crashed and burned, as the deck turned out to be amazing, but I do not think my train of thought was wrong. I knew we were looking at everything with rose-colored glasses and I compensated for that, and the fact that once our glasses were off, reality turned out to actually be pink, doesn’t mean we didn’t have them to begin with.

7. Availability Cascade

A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
In Magic, it’s hard for us to test everything by ourselves. Thankfully, we don’t have to, as the internet provides us with a sort of “collective brain” full of information that other people have acquired. The problem emerges when the original information is incorrect and ends up spreading more and more, with each new person simply repeating the original information and by doing that validating it and making it even harder to challenge.
Something like this happened when we were testing for PT Milwaukee. The deck I liked, g with the Battle Rage/Become Immense combo, was supposed to have problems with G/W. It made sense—G/W is usually good versus red decks because your creatures are bigger and you have some life gain. But, most importantly, everyone everywhere said that the matchup was good for G/W—it was just common knowledge.
Except that it wasn’t right. In fact, the match was pretty good for the red deck, pre- and post-board. It only took us a couple games to figure it out, but then we tested more and more because we wanted to make sure. But that didn’t make any sense. Everyone said the matchup was good for G/W. Every player I talked to, and every article. Were they all wrong? Were we wrong?
The answer to this is probably that at some point someone was wrong, and then misinformation spread. A lot of the people who said G/W beat red hadn’t actually played the matchup. They were just repeating what other people said. Some of those had played the matchup, and concluded that red was better, but faced with overwhelming odds, they conceded that they were probably wrong and the matchup was actually good for G/W. So you end up having a scenario where, say, of 10 people to give you an answer, the first 3 think G/W wins, and the next 7 either think red wins or have no opinion, but all 10 will end up telling you that G/W wins because that’s the accepted consensus.
The way to compensate for this is to know that people can be wrong, that something is not necessarily true because it’s common knowledge, and that you are able to challenge it. You can’t doubt popular wisdom every single time of course, but knowing this phenomenon exists is important because it tells you that when your findings go against common knowledge, you aren’t necessarily going against hundreds of players . You might be going against just one or two that happened to be the first ones.
Patrick Chapin actually wrote an article about this a long time ago, and it’s one of my all-time favorites.

8. Pro-Innovation Bias

The tendency to have an excessive optimism toward an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Another deck building bias, and one we see all the time in spoiler season, where we think everything is broken and believe that because something is new, it must be an improvement over something that already exists. I can cite Oath of Ajani as an example, where people said turn-2 Oath of Ajani into turn-3 Gideon into turn-4 Nissa was a new possible “nut draw in Standard” while forgetting that you could already do that with a number of mana creatures.
This bias is tough to balance in Magic because if something is an improvement, we want to be the first ones to find it. As a result, we want to push the best-case scenario for every new card and if it’s good enough, we see if its flaws can be mitigated. The important thing is that you don’t skip the “flaws” part. You should be positive at first, but you cannot ignore its limitations and weaknesses forever.

Hey folks how ya doing.
Okay, so today we're going to go over tips and tricks to spot agent provocateur tactics, the importance of reviewing post history, and some key rules to remember when engaging with opposing viewpoints of questionable integrity.
First of all, let's differentiate between Trolling and Shilling. A lot of people will say they are the same thing out of ignorance. That's not to say that someone who equates the two is stupid, just uninformed as to the real relation between the terms.
So let's get started.
PART ONE: TROLLS
We'll kick this off with a definition:
Troll (informal): make a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.
Trolling is, at its core, a morally bankrupt activity. Regardless of belief in the content of the message, trying to Troll someone is primarily an attempt to elicit a negative response out of someone else. As such, Trolling comes in many forms, and usually commit a fallacy of some kind.
Some Trolls are more subtle than others. On one end of the spectrum is the Low-Effort Troll, trying to get a rise out of someone purely through Personal Attacks, Imitation-Baiting, Excessive use of Sarcasm/Questioning/Italics, etc. These Trolls are easy to spot.
On the other hand, the High-Effort Troll will incorporate sneakiness: Feigned Agreement, Appeal to Authority and Undermining Tactics. A Troll that starts out agreeing with you will be harder to spot, and often will hook their target deeply into discussion before they realize they are being trolled. A lot of High-Effort Trolling tactics involve the ambiguity of emotional load that comes with conversing entirely through the written word: Always remember that words and sentences can have multiple meanings depending on inflection, and if you are in doubt about the sincerity of a comment, always try speaking it out loud a few times with different levels of implied sarcasm in your voice. If it seems like the argument could turn against you easily, be cautious.
So how do you fight a Troll? It's simple: you don't. The Troll is there specifically to fight. By engaging him, you ensure his victory. Your argument may be airtight, you might bring all the evidence you need to convince any rational person. The Troll doesn't care, he's already made you waste your time and gotten a rise out of you. So remember the cardinal rule of internet discourse: DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
PART TWO: SHILLS
Time for another definition. This one is a little older, and not directly relevant to Shilling on the Internet, but I picked it because it exposes the core deceit at play:
Shill (slang): a confidence trickster's assistant, esp a person who poses as an ordinary customer, gambler, etc, in order to entice others to participate.
The Shill is the guy on the street, beating the Huckster at Three-Card Monty, waving around a stack of twenties that he just won for everybody to see. If Trolling is a morally bankrupt activity, Shilling is moral corruption. The Shill may know they are in the wrong (and likely do), but does not care as long as they make money. As a result, Shilling is a higher art-form than Trolling. While the Troll can skate by on base insults or sarcasm, the Shill must be a seasoned debater, be able to argue a position well, and must have the resources to debunk or otherwise undermine the position of their opponent. If they are a true Shill, they will be all of these things. After all, they are by definition paid for their services.
The most important distinction between a Shill and a Troll is a matter of targeting. Where you, the debater, is the target for a Troll, the Shill is targeting the audience, i.e. the random person who curiously stumbles into the thread and doesn't know what to think about the subject at hand. The Shill isn't paid to enrage the skeptic, he is paid to influence the debate.
The effective Shill will have their own method of undermining an argument, but will generally use one of three methods. They are all effective if executed well, and are all psychological in nature.

The Professor: This tactic attempts to present the Shill as the rational, intelligent side of the argument. He will seem to take the moral and logical high ground. His verbosity will only be matched by the scalpel-like precision with which he wields it. He will refer you to mainstream news articles proving his point. This is a very effective method, because to the average curious person he will seem legitimately intelligent. Luckily, it's implementation requires a dedicated and well-read individual to pull off, and is not seen as often as others. Unfortunately, when it does turn up, it is often nearly indistinguishable from a genuine engaged commenter presenting his viewpoint. Because of this, accusing The Professor of Shilling should be a last resort: If you can secure a genuine victory through continued debate, it is much preferred to calling him out.
The Saboteur: Similar in rhetoric to High-Effort Trolling, but decidedly more sophisticated. The Saboteur will take your side of the argument and blow it so far out of proportion it loses credibility with anybody who isn't already a part of the debate. A classic example is the "missile plane" theory found fairly frequently in 9/11 skeptic circles, i.e. "the planes were cruise missiles mocked up to look like planes." This is of course absurd, as the impacts in no way resemble cruise missile explosions. But it is close enough to the "drone flights" theory (in contrast, a much sounder argument) to be linked in the minds of an uninformed reader, and therefore the former theory reduces the credibility of the latter. This is an easier tactic to combat, but requires long-winded responses that thoroughly deconstruct the issue at hand.
The Incredulous Bystander: This method of Shilling is the most common of the three. The Shill comes into a debate in progress, and commits the Fallacy of Personal Incredulity ad nauseum. "I'm sorry, I just can't accept that [abc] is [xyz]. It's just impossible, there's no way." This will go on and on. No matter what you throw at him, he will come back with the same incredulity. The purpose is simple: make the poster look like their argument is too fantastical for the average person to agree with. Although it's very easy to defeat The Incredulous Bystander by simple logical arguments, be careful. You have to know when to disengage, or the sheer repetition will make your argument seem desperate. Make a final argument against their disingenuous bafflement early, within three replies if possible. Then disengage completely, even if they come back to try and lead you on some more.

Like I said, there are variations on each of these paradigms, and each Shill's methods will be different. More intelligent or better-equipped Shills will use dirty tactics (Vote Manipulation, Multiple Account Shilling, etc.). Sometimes the combined effort of a group of Shills or Shill Accounts can simply be too much to combat alone. In these cases, it's simply best to downvote and disengage. Not every battle can be won.
PART THREE: HOW TO I.D. A TROLL/SHILL ACCOUNT
Thanks to the (fairly) open nature of account creation and tracking on reddit, certain things can be learned about an account from the Account Overview Page. Patterns emerge in every account, regardless of if the account is an active Troll/Shill, or not. It is through the account's activity and past comments that one can glean insight into the intentions of an individual.
A Regular Poster will look something like the account I linked above, which is mine. Post history and comment content may be concentrated to certain subreddits and ideas at times, but will more likely be varied with little recognizable pattern. This is because the individual behind the account doesn't have an agenda beyond personal entertainment (or knowledge acquisition) on the site.
Since Trolling is an activity anybody with a chip on their shoulder can do, not every Troll will be a dedicated Troll Account. Sometimes, people Troll without realizing they're doing it. But there are some hallmarks to look out for: conspicuously high numbers of short, one- or two-sentence responses, a tendency to make every statement a question, abnormal distribution of comments (i.e. the last 50 comments in one thread), and excessive use of casual ridicule when responding to serious comments ("lolwat/get your head checked/wow you're stupid", etc). Additionally, another way to identify part-time Trolls and Flamers is to check their comment history for key subreddits. If somebody shows up and says something questionably racist, derogatory or inflammatory, look for subreddits that might be indicative of that account holder's moral leanings (for example, posts to /whiterights, /greatapes and /ZOG are all good indicators that the poster is racist. Call them out on it!).
A Shill Account will look decidedly different, and might at first glance seem like a normal poster. But there are a couple of key identifiers that can help you form your opinion on the intentions of the account holder:
Karma Authority and Perceived Age: Shills go through accounts like cigarettes. Once a Shill account is identified as such, it is nearly useless for anything except vote manipulation. And reddit's mods (at least, the good ones) have gotten pretty good at identifying accounts that break site rules. This is especially true for /conspiracy and a few related subs. So Shills are often stuck using extremely young accounts with very little commentary added to the site as a whole. These accounts have very little authority with the more skeptical member of the audience smart enough to look at the account history. Seeing zero karma, an age measured in days instead of months, and less than a page of posts doesn't invoke trust in that account's opinion. So Shill accounts will be "aged": The account will be created, one post (or a few) will be made, and that post's karma will be manipulated by the Shill's other accounts, just enough to get the karma up around 150~200. The account will then be left untouched for anywhere between 4 months and a year. Once this period of time is up, the account is brought back to life and the Shill starts posting. Now, the less-thorough reader will see an account that is 7 months old, has 80 link and 225 comment karma, and looks to be active. If they scroll to the bottom of the comment history, they would see that it's a fake set up to look that way, but most people won't. Always check for Perceived Age. If the history goes beyond 20 pages of comments, chances are good the account is legit.
Defense Of The Tyrant: Thanks to the paid nature of their job, the Shill will not advocate reasonable positions. They are specifically here to lessen the impact of questionable material, undermine the opposition to negative aspects of the Status Quo, and make skeptics and activists look bad. The most current example is the rampant Shilling for the Police found in nearly every thread that covers Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Police Brutality or related issues. It is not a popular opinion to defend tyranny, and yet for every post condemning police violence, there is another apologist (or downright authoritarian) comment accusing any protest of undermining the authority of the stewards of public safety. Some of these are regular (if horribly misguided) posters. But it is absolutely an indicator of Shilling, and if you see it combined with other indicators, there is a good chance they were paid to skew the conversation further towards confusion, vitriol, animosity and gridlock.
"Deadly Serious": As has been previously stated, the Shill has a specific goal of making their argument look better than another. In this regard, they will use every tool they have to undermine their opponent. One logical fallacy is commonly used: Appeal to Emotion, AKA The "Deadly Serious" argument. When you appeal to emotion, you are attempting to scare the audience into reactive thinking. "Harassing Police is Deadly Serious" is a good example. You inject the fear of personal safety into the conversation: "What if the cops just quit? Rampant crime! I don't want to have to fear for myself and my children! I don't like it, but this guy has a point." It's a fallacy because emotion is irrational. The reality is there is a problem in this country, and whether or not police will "put up with" protesting is completely unrelated to the actual issue of the creeping authoritarianism plaguing law enforcement throughout America. Again, anybody can Appeal to Emotion accidentally, but if you see it over and over again in the account history, it's most likely deliberate abuse of the fallacy.
PART FOUR: BEST PRACTICES FOR FIGHTING SHILLS
So, you've identified a Shill. You've decided not to put up with it. What do you do?
First of all, keep calm. Engaging in heated debate makes both sides of the argument seem irrational, to your detriment. The Shill doesn't have to look good, he just has to make you look bad, or without that, make the debate so incomprehensibly vitriolic that the audience decides to leave and do something else. By making your case logically, rationally, and without emotional attachment or useless insults, you will come off as logical, rational, informed, and respectable.
Second: Debate the Topic primarily, not the Opposition. Attacks on Authority and Integrity are useful only once Authority and Integrity are in doubt. Until then (or if you are up against The Professor), you are just giving the Shill more ammo to use against you. Stay on topic, don't get lost in semantics and nitpicking, state your case simply. If you do things right, most Shills will give up before you.
Third: Karma is Useless. Ever since reddit changed the voting scheme there has been absolutely no point to tracking Karma as an indicator of winning a conversation or not. Brigading is absolutely a problem whether or not the mods acknowledge it, and chances are good your posts will be net negative, even if you are clearly winning your argument. Don't let it get to you! It's an imaginary number that is easily skewed.
I'm pretty close to character limit at this point, so I figure it's about time to stop this train. Comments, Questions, anything is welcome. This is a rough outline of my own experiences with logic and debate in the treacherous semantic waters we swim in, and is by no means complete. Take these ideas and interpret them, expand on them, make them your own. Then spread it where you can. Any commenter can be a strong debater, if they know the pitfalls and traps that are set for them.
Oh, almost forgot. This post is also an open invitation to any Ex-Shills that want to share their knowledge.
Remember folks, Stay Skeptical.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170912011148/reddit.com/digital_manipulation
https://np.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/87w9ei/top_bully_of_top_minds_goes_delete_after_a_debate

Hey folks how ya doing.
Okay, so today we're going to go over tips and tricks to spot Trolling/Shilling, the importance of reviewing post history, and some key rules to remember when engaging with opposing viewpoints of questionable integrity.
First of all, let's differentiate between Trolling and Shilling. A lot of people will say they are the same thing out of ignorance. That's not to say that someone who equates the two is stupid, just uninformed as to the real relation between the terms.
So let's get started.
PART ONE: TROLLS
We'll kick this off with a definition:

Troll (informal): make a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.

Trolling is, at its core, a morally bankrupt activity. Regardless of belief in the content of the message, trying to Troll someone is primarily an attempt to elicit a negative response out of someone else. As such, Trolling comes in many forms, and usually commit a fallacy of some kind.
Some Trolls are more subtle than others. On one end of the spectrum is the Low-Effort Troll, trying to get a rise out of someone purely through Personal Attacks, Imitation-Baiting, Excessive use of Sarcasm/Questioning/Italics, etc. These Trolls are easy to spot.
On the other hand, the High-Effort Troll will incorporate sneakiness: Feigned Agreement, Appeal to Authority and Undermining Tactics. A Troll that starts out agreeing with you will be harder to spot, and often will hook their target deeply into discussion before they realize they are being trolled. A lot of High-Effort Trolling tactics involve the ambiguity of emotional load that comes with conversing entirely through the written word: Always remember that words and sentences can have multiple meanings depending on inflection, and if you are in doubt about the sincerity of a comment, always try speaking it out loud a few times with different levels of implied sarcasm in your voice. If it seems like the argument could turn against you easily, be cautious.
So how do you fight a Troll? It's simple: you don't. The Troll is there specifically to fight. By engaging him, you ensure his victory. Your argument may be airtight, you might bring all the evidence you need to convince any rational person. The Troll doesn't care, he's already made you waste your time and gotten a rise out of you. So remember the cardinal rule of internet discourse: DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
PART TWO: SHILLS
Time for another definition. This one is a little older, and not directly relevant to Shilling on the Internet, but I picked it because it exposes the core deceit at play:

Shill (slang): a confidence trickster's assistant, esp a person who poses as an ordinary customer, gambler, etc, in order to entice others to participate.

The Shill is the guy on the street, beating the Huckster at Three-Card Monty, waving around a stack of twenties that he just won for everybody to see. If Trolling is a morally bankrupt activity, Shilling is moral corruption. The Shill may know they are in the wrong (and likely do), but does not care as long as they make money. As a result, Shilling is a higher art-form than Trolling. While the Troll can skate by on base insults or sarcasm, the Shill must be a seasoned debater, be able to argue a position well, and must have the resources to debunk or otherwise undermine the position of their opponent. If they are a true Shill, they will be all of these things. After all, they are by definition paid for their services.
The most important distinction between a Shill and a Troll is a matter of targeting. Where you, the debater, is the target for a Troll, the Shill is targeting the audience, i.e. the random person who curiously stumbles into the thread and doesn't know what to think about the subject at hand. The Shill isn't paid to enrage the skeptic, he is paid to influence the debate.
The effective Shill will have their own method of undermining an argument, but will generally use one of three methods. They are all effective if executed well, and are all psychological in nature.

The Professor: This tactic attempts to present the Shill as the rational, intelligent side of the argument. He will seem to take the moral and logical high ground. His verbosity will only be matched by the scalpel-like precision with which he wields it. He will refer you to mainstream news articles proving his point. This is a very effective method, because to the average curious person he will seem legitimately intelligent. Luckily, it's implementation requires a dedicated and well-read individual to pull off, and is not seen as often as others. Unfortunately, when it does turn up, it is often nearly indistinguishable from a genuine engaged commenter presenting his viewpoint. Because of this, accusing The Professor of Shilling should be a last resort: If you can secure a genuine victory through continued debate, it is much preferred to calling him out.
The Saboteur: Similar in rhetoric to High-Effort Trolling, but decidedly more sophisticated. The Saboteur will take your side of the argument and blow it so far out of proportion it loses credibility with anybody who isn't already a part of the debate. A classic example is the "missile plane" theory found fairly frequently in 9/11 skeptic circles, i.e. "the planes were cruise missiles mocked up to look like planes." This is of course absurd, as the impacts in no way resemble cruise missile explosions. But it is close enough to the "drone flights" theory (in contrast, a much sounder argument) to be linked in the minds of an uninformed reader, and therefore the former theory reduces the credibility of the latter. This is an easier tactic to combat, but requires long-winded responses that thoroughly deconstruct the issue at hand.
The Incredulous Bystander: This method of Shilling is the most common of the three. The Shill comes into a debate in progress, and commits the Fallacy of Personal Incredulity ad nauseum. "I'm sorry, I just can't accept that [abc] is [xyz]. It's just impossible, there's no way." This will go on and on. No matter what you throw at him, he will come back with the same incredulity. The purpose is simple: make the poster look like their argument is too fantastical for the average person to agree with. Although it's very easy to defeat The Incredulous Bystander by simple logical arguments, be careful. You have to know when to disengage, or the sheer repetition will make your argument seem desperate. Make a final argument against their disingenuous bafflement early, within three replies if possible. Then disengage completely, even if they come back to try and lead you on some more.

Like I said, there are variations on each of these paradigms, and each Shill's methods will be different. More intelligent or better-equipped Shills will use dirty tactics (Vote Manipulation, Multiple Account Shilling, etc.). Sometimes the combined effort of a group of Shills or Shill Accounts can simply be too much to combat alone. In these cases, it's simply best to downvote and disengage. Not every battle can be won.
PART THREE: HOW TO I.D. A TROLL/SHILL ACCOUNT
Thanks to the (fairly) open nature of account creation and tracking on reddit, certain things can be learned about an account from the Account Overview Page. Patterns emerge in every account, regardless of if the account is an active Troll/Shill, or not. It is through the account's activity and past comments that one can glean insight into the intentions of an individual.
A Regular Poster will look something like the account I linked above, which is mine. Post history and comment content may be concentrated to certain subreddits and ideas at times, but will more likely be varied with little recognizable pattern. This is because the individual behind the account doesn't have an agenda beyond personal entertainment (or knowledge acquisition) on the site.
Since Trolling is an activity anybody with a chip on their shoulder can do, not every Troll will be a dedicated Troll Account. Sometimes, people Troll without realizing they're doing it. But there are some hallmarks to look out for: conspicuously high numbers of short, one- or two-sentence responses, a tendency to make every statement a question, abnormal distribution of comments (i.e. the last 50 comments in one thread), and excessive use of casual ridicule when responding to serious comments ("lolwat/get your head checked/wow you're stupid", etc). Additionally, another way to identify part-time Trolls and Flamers is to check their comment history for key subreddits. If somebody shows up and says something questionably racist, derogatory or inflammatory, look for subreddits that might be indicative of that account holder's moral leanings (for example, posts to /whiterights, /greatapes and /ZOG are all good indicators that the poster is racist. Call them out on it!).
A Shill Account will look decidedly different, and might at first glance seem like a normal poster. But there are a couple of key identifiers that can help you form your opinion on the intentions of the account holder:

Karma Authority and Perceived Age: Shills go through accounts like cigarettes. Once a Shill account is identified as such, it is nearly useless for anything except vote manipulation. And reddit's mods (at least, the good ones) have gotten pretty good at identifying accounts that break site rules. This is especially true for /conspiracy and a few related subs. So Shills are often stuck using extremely young accounts with very little commentary added to the site as a whole. These accounts have very little authority with the more skeptical member of the audience smart enough to look at the account history. Seeing zero karma, an age measured in days instead of months, and less than a page of posts doesn't invoke trust in that account's opinion. So Shill accounts will be "aged": The account will be created, one post (or a few) will be made, and that post's karma will be manipulated by the Shill's other accounts, just enough to get the karma up around 150~200. The account will then be left untouched for anywhere between 4 months and a year. Once this period of time is up, the account is brought back to life and the Shill starts posting. Now, the less-thorough reader will see an account that is 7 months old, has 80 link and 225 comment karma, and looks to be active. If they scroll to the bottom of the comment history, they would see that it's a fake set up to look that way, but most people won't. Always check for Perceived Age. If the history goes beyond 20 pages of comments, chances are good the account is legit.
Defense Of The Tyrant: Thanks to the paid nature of their job, the Shill will not advocate reasonable positions. They are specifically here to lessen the impact of questionable material, undermine the opposition to negative aspects of the Status Quo, and make skeptics and activists look bad. The most current example is the rampant Shilling for the Police found in nearly every thread that covers Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Police Brutality or related issues. It is not a popular opinion to defend tyranny, and yet for every post condemning police violence, there is another apologist (or downright authoritarian) comment accusing any protest of undermining the authority of the stewards of public safety. Some of these are regular (if horribly misguided) posters. But it is absolutely an indicator of Shilling, and if you see it combined with other indicators, there is a good chance they were paid to skew the conversation further towards confusion, vitriol, animosity and gridlock.
"Deadly Serious": As has been previously stated, the Shill has a specific goal of making their argument look better than another. In this regard, they will use every tool they have to undermine their opponent. One logical fallacy is commonly used: Appeal to Emotion, AKA The "Deadly Serious" argument. When you appeal to emotion, you are attempting to scare the audience into reactive thinking. "Harassing Police is Deadly Serious" is a good example. You inject the fear of personal safety into the conversation: "What if the cops just quit? Rampant crime! I don't want to have to fear for myself and my children! I don't like it, but this guy has a point." It's a fallacy because emotion is irrational. The reality is there is a problem in this country, and whether or not police will "put up with" protesting is completely unrelated to the actual issue of the creeping authoritarianism plaguing law enforcement throughout America. Again, anybody can Appeal to Emotion accidentally, but if you see it over and over again in the account history, it's most likely deliberate abuse of the fallacy.

PART FOUR: BEST PRACTICES FOR FIGHTING SHILLS
So, you've identified a Shill. You've decided not to put up with it. What do you do?
First of all, keep calm. Engaging in heated debate makes both sides of the argument seem irrational, to your detriment. The Shill doesn't have to look good, he just has to make you look bad, or without that, make the debate so incomprehensibly vitriolic that the audience decides to leave and do something else. By making your case logically, rationally, and without emotional attachment or useless insults, you will come off as logical, rational, informed, and respectable.
Second: Debate the Topic primarily, not the Opposition. Attacks on Authority and Integrity are useful only once Authority and Integrity are in doubt. Until then (or if you are up against The Professor), you are just giving the Shill more ammo to use against you. Stay on topic, don't get lost in semantics and nitpicking, state your case simply. If you do things right, most Shills will give up before you.
Third: Karma is Useless. Ever since reddit changed the voting scheme there has been absolutely no point to tracking Karma as an indicator of winning a conversation or not. Brigading is absolutely a problem whether or not the mods acknowledge it, and chances are good your posts will be net negative, even if you are clearly winning your argument. Don't let it get to you! It's an imaginary number that is easily skewed.
I'm pretty close to character limit at this point, so I figure it's about time to stop this train. Comments, Questions, anything is welcome. This is a rough outline of my own experiences with logic and debate in the treacherous semantic waters we swim in, and is by no means complete. Take these ideas and interpret them, expand on them, make them your own. Then spread it where you can. Any commenter can be a strong debater, if they know the pitfalls and traps that are set for them.
Oh, almost forgot. This post is also an open invitation to any Ex-Shills that want to share their knowledge.
Remember folks, Stay Skeptical.

Explaining the psychology of the gambler’s fallacy ...

gambler fallacy definition psychology

gambler fallacy definition psychology - win

Breaking the mold: Analyzing units and squads fairly

1. Distinction Bias

2. Conservatism Bias

3. Selective Perception

4. Anchoring Bias

5. Availability Cascade

6. Gambler's Fallacy

Closing Thoughts

Weird. I have no more feelings for my LO.

Drop Rates and Gaming Mindset

Grading 22 FPL podcasts

Comprehensive list of agent provocateur tactics.

8 Cognitive Biases that are ruining Hearthstone for you