|
This will be my absolute last chance to put up anything of substance before the deadline tomorrow. I won't vote yet as it takes but a minute to do that, but I did have just one more thing to add to this growing mix...
It sure looks to me at the moment that we are in a two horse race with SpM and TP as our prime candidates for lynching. I've already outlined my reasons for suspecting both so shan't go into those again here. I will be checking in on the debate until tomorrow morning, but at this point my vote is going to be for The Phantom (BUT THAT'S NOT MY OFFICIAL VOTE! I want to see what happens when the voting actually begins) -- not because I am more convinced of his guilt than I am of Saucy's but because even if he is innocent, TP is doing more to hinder the villagers than help us.
Put bluntly, TP is either a wolf or an innocent who is helping the wolves by distracting our attention with his own suspicious behaviour, and slinging enough mud around to fill a horse paddock. While it would be ideal for us to kill a wolf, there's always the chance that we might kill an innocent -- so by lynching the Phantom we can at least minimise the damage by ridding ourselves of the distraction.
And here's the really brutal part: the Phantom has floated a lot of opinions and put forward a lot of theories -- they may be good or they may not. The problem is, I can't really assess them because I don't know if I can trust him. So even if he isn't a wolf, lynching him will tell me that he's an innocent and I can assess his posts more usefully.
Please do not misunderstand me: I am not saying that I don't care if he is a wolf or not, nor am I suggesting that killing an innocent can be beneficial to us in any way. I'm only saying that the damage to us is minimised if we kill an innocent Phantom rather than an innocent Spm.
Some highly theoretical math:
Given that I believe (and I think many others do too) that there is a roughly equal chance of either TP or SPM being a wolf:
Lynching TP brings the potential benefit of killing a wolf which decreases their numbers by 1.
Lynching SpM brings the exact same potential benefit: one less wolf. Given the equivalent value of 1 they cancel each other out: there's no difference between the two.
Lynching TP brings the potential danger of killing an innocent which decreases our numbers by 1. Again the same danger comes with Spm -- so still, no difference.
But then we come to the more intangibles. Killing an innocent TP brings the benefit of removing his confusing posts from the mix, and clarifying the real status of his posts to date. Killing an innocent SpM carries no equivalent benefit.
So it's close, but it seems to me the logical choice to vote for The Phantom: the only reason I won't do so right now is that my line of reasoning begins with and depends upon the idea that there is an equivalent chance that TP and SPM are wolves: I want to wait and make sure that this does not change in the next few hours.
To Bed!
|