i don’t like winning in avalon

posted jan 2026

at the WUDC 2026 Open Finals, a speaker says:

Imagine a speaker so persuasive it could convince you of any possible argument … if you heard an argument from that speaker, you should just never be persuaded, because you know it could equally convince you of the opposite of the truth as easily as it can convince you of the truth.

This idea — roughly the tension between persuasion and manipulation — is something I used to think about a lot! I thought about it recently after some conversations with new friends about many a past life. I think about it whenever I win a game of Avalon. And it’s something that makes me pretty uncomfortable! So let’s blab about it publicly on the internet.

past lives

One of my first jobs was to sell ice-cream door-to-door. I found it on Gumtree or something; I was a teenager who wanted money. I started in Lavender and was pretty crap, then did it a few more times in Choa Chu Kang and got better. The ah beng who coordinated this taught me a bunch of sales techniques. For example, I should start by handing my block of ice cream to the customer, so they can’t simply close the door on you because now they’re physically holding your product. Or, I should make valid conditional statements where the antecedent is possibly false, follow it up by “does that make sense?”, and hope that people evaluate the validity of the conditional statement, and possibly truth of the consequent.

Many years later I learned that this is a thing, and one can find many Reddit threads complaining about people who do this, oops.