Life is not a social deduction game

Epistemic status: Obvious, old stuff, but hopefully a catchy term In a social deduction game, players receive goals and roles. Depending on the complexity of the game, there is a more or less direct correlation between a player's tendency to lie, their role, and their goal. If you have the skill of identifying lies (i.e. if you are good at social deduction), then you can make educated guesses at the distribution of roles and goals. In other words, your skills at the social level (what people are saying) give you information about the object level (what people are talking about). In real life there is no analogous distribution of the roles of "liar" and "not liar". Even if you could know everyone's "roles", this wouldn't necessarily give you information about the object level. Despite this, some heuristics might sometimes be useful, so I plan to list here all I come across: Sad revolutionaries When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow. William T. Vollmann, Rising Up The Missing Moods You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold. Bryan Caplan The Mellow Heuristic Step 1: Look at how emotional each side is.  Step 2: Assume the less emotional side is right and the more emotional side is wrong. Bryan Caplan Discuss