Happy Mother's Day

A post in honor of Theresa Strohl, as kick-ass at motherhood as at everything else she does.

Children are tiny people. 

 

Ever since I began forming long-term memories, Mom's treated me like a person. Not a "child", not a "daughter" and not "mine". She never put me in an essentializing conceptual box with a label of any sort. She's always thought of me as a separate human being with my own values, talents, and ambitions.

I used to take this for granted, but then I met everyone else.

When you love someone and you have nearly complete power over them, I imagine it must be very difficult not to redirect them when they diverge from your personal model of what you'd like them to be. I think a lot of parents let their love for their children become oppressive; they're so afraid their child might get hurt, or acquire unforeseen values, or believe different things than they do, that they force them along a path they feel to be safe.

Mom gave me the room to weigh risks myself, and trusted me to discover successes she never could have provided on her own.

This has caused me to keep my identity (relatively) small. Curiosity, relinquishment, and most of the other virtues I care about are extremely difficult to practice when changing feels like killing off parts of yourself. Because Mom gave me freedom to become, I have felt not at all constrained to remain as I am. This freedom, combined with the urge to know for which Dad is largely responsible, has produced a willingness to surrender to the truth that has so far proven to be my most powerful skill as a rationalist.

I never came out.

Perhaps the most striking evidence that this method was effective is that I never came out as queer (or bi, or however I thought of it when I first realized I'm often attracted to people who aren't men). I think I wrote a blog post about it at some point in high school (back on Livejournal *cough*), but it was definitely an afterthought. Mom didn't essentialize my sexual orientation any more than she did any other part of my identity, so I had no reason to do so myself.

Let me be clear: I was raised in a tiny Midwestern town, in a Catholic parish no less. It really is extremely strange that my first thought upon discovering I was attracted to a female classmate was, "Maybe I should ask her out," rather than something along the lines of, "Oh god does this mean I'm GAY? What do I do? AM I GOING TO HELL? No one must know. What will I tell my parents? Will they still love me???" There was absolutely none of that. I was very surprised to discover other people react that way.

It just wasn't a thing for me.

We're totally bff's.

 

Our relationship has changed over the years as easily as I have changed myself. It does not fit in a box called "mother/daughter". Everything about our interactions means more to me because of that.

Mom's a good friend of mine these days. We have a lot in common, and we make each other happy. I learn from her, she learns from me, and we think of each other as peers with a lot of love and history between us.

When I'm making a difficult decision, I ask for her advice because I value her opinion, and I'm never worried that I'll let her down by not doing what she suggests. No topic is out of bounds; she tells me about cute boys she's dating, recounts Sunday homilies when they inspire her (though she knows I'm an atheist), and gets genuinely excited when I tell her about a cool book I'm reading, even if it's about number theory.

I look up to her because she is a wise and compassionate woman worthy of my admiration and gratitude. I honor her today because she is an exceptional human being. I am tremendously lucky that she also happens to be my mother.

A Parable on the Urge to Know

Here’s an example of what I’d call an “elegant update” (hewing closely to a true story).

A couple of years ago, my boyfriend and I had both come down with bad colds. We went to the pharmacy, and he planned to grab some cold medicine while I picked up tissues and some other groceries. When he failed to meet me at the front after I was done, I went back to the aisle where I’d left him. He was staring at the wall of medicines looking perplexed and frustrated. “What’s taking so long?” I said.

“I don’t know how to choose!” he replied. There were dozens of options, and he couldn’t come up with a good way to evaluate them. He’d been stumped for fifteen minutes. He was experiencing choice paralysis. “There are a dozen different brands that all say they’re for stuffy noses, congestion, and coughing. How am I supposed to pick one?”

I picked up a few bottles to check out the active ingredients. “Anything with dextromethorphan, guicinophen, and phenylephrine will do,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because everything that says ‘congestion’ has guicinophen while nothing else does, everything that says ‘coughing’ has dextromethorphan while nothing else does, and everything that says ‘stuffy nose’ has phenylephrine while nothing else does. They even have the same doses of all of those. The ‘inactive ingredients’ vary, but it’s all stuff like corn syrup and flavoring. I want to pay for feeling healthy, not tasting bubblegum.” I tossed him the cheapest one with all three.

When we got home, I Googled each of those ingredients and discovered that I should have gone to the pharmacist and asked for something with ephedrine instead of phenylephrine, since ephedrine reliably outperforms placebos while phenylephrine doesn’t. We went back for it a bit later. Still, I was able to finally get us out of that damn pharmacy with effective medication and home to watch gargoyles and eat soup, because my first thought was “What actually works, and how can I know?” instead of the epistemically neutral “Which of these brands should I buy?” My urge to know the truth let me cut through the advertizing to successfully achieve my goals.

The elegant update I have in mind here is not “Check the active ingredients when choosing medications” (though that actually has frequent concrete advantages). The update is “When you’re faced with many options, ask yourself what your end goal is and how you would know which option is likely to bring you closer to achieving it.” My boyfriend tells me this is one of the greatest impacts I’ve had on his life over the four years we’ve known each other. It’s a tiny little habit I’ve always taken for granted because I was raised by scientists. But since this was news to him, it dramatically altered how he thought about making choices.

I ended up making an important update that day as well. I’m honored to be dating one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and I knew that early on. This brief interaction was the first time it really sunk in that there’s more to being rational than having an especially powerful brain--which meant that maybe I needed to search for better methods, too. Before, I’d thought I was pretty much stuck with whatever intelligence I’d been born with, plus or minus memorizing a lot of facts. But really, I had some major advantages over someone with more innate brain power, because I’d learned more powerful cognitive methodology. I’d been trained, to some extent, in epistemic rationality.

What if, I wondered, there is even more to learn?

Rationality Activism

Secular groups should devote more resources to rationality activism. If you know what I mean by "rationality activism" and agree that we should be focusing on it more, you can stop here. Otherwise, read on.

Activism?

People get a little jumpy sometimes when I mention "activism" in the context of the secular movement. It often brings to mind "evangelical atheists" and concerted efforts to undermine religion. That's a scary picture when we've made so much progress toward establishing inviting communities, engaging in productive dialogues with religious organizations, and improving the atheist image. But I think this comes from a misunderstanding about what a secular group is and could be.

There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding our relationship with religious people and organizations. Many individual members have at least an intuition that there's something genuinely harmful about religion (or particular kinds of religion), and that the world would be better off without it. I strongly sympathize. Many central features of most of the largest religions are frightening and dangerous. On the other hand, even if a secular group wanted to fight religion explicitly, the project would probably fail. It isn't a practical strategy. (I'll happily defend that for anyone who asks me to, but since my goal is to describe an alternative method that would sidestep this issue, I'm not going to use this space to re-hash that apparently endless "confrontation vs. accommodation" debate.) 

So a lot of groups make the primary focus community building; one thing atheists lack is a ready-made community center where they know they'll be welcomed and accepted. It's very important secular groups maintain that particular function, whatever else we do in addition. At the very least, a strong community is simply a prerequisite for a successful community-based activist project.

The mistake we frequently make is in thinking that we must either be anti-religious or avoid activism entirely. This is silly. There is a positive approach to activism that makes sense for us, and not only would taking it give us direction, but we're uniquely situated to make rapid and far-reaching improvements to the world should we unite toward this goal.

Religion is not the problem.

"Activism" is about passionate, coordinated efforts to change the world. What secular activism should be depends on what changes we want to make to the world. What are those changes? What counts as "winning" for the secular movement? I don't think "equal social status and protection under the laws for non-religious people" is the answer to that particular question, even if it's definitely a significant improvement to the current situation. (It is, of course, a mission particular organizations within the secular movement should be focusing on. I'm speaking more generally, and especially to student groups.) It's certainly a crucial step along the path, but our preoccupation with science, for example, is evidence that we already have our sights set higher than that.

If we really stop to think about it, I doubt "the end of religion" is the answer either. Imagine that, overnight, all organized religion disappears. Everything else remains the same, but nobody goes to church, nobody prays, and nobody believes in God. I'll definitely grant that this is a net improvement. Shall we call it a day and keep to ourselves from here on out, or is there more work to be done?

Before the advent of this anti-religious miracle, what bothered me about religion was a very simple matter: Many religious memes are powerful deterrents to rational decision making. They can act as parasites that latch onto our cognitive biases and drain away whatever potential we have to inoculate ourselves against them. My concern is not, at heart, with religion itself, but with its exacerbation of irrationality that comes pre-installed in human brains to start with. Self-reinforcing systematic irrationality causes incredible damage, and is plausibly responsible for all of the harm religion has ever done.

If it weren't for this particular feature, I wouldn't care much about religion, and I suspect most atheists (and anti-theists) wouldn't either. Religious people would simply be wrong, like someone who thinks the moon is made of cheese, and that would be that. 

This is why we secularists also spend our time educating people about homeopathy, chiropractic, and astrology when we get together in groups. We care about a deeper problem than religion.

We don't so much want the end of religion as the dawn of rationality.

Rationality Activism

Rationality activism means raising the sanity waterline. The notion of rationality I have in mind amounts to "systematic optimization from inside a human brain". I do not mean, for example, never relying on intuition to make decisions, ignoring emotion, or valuing only quantifiable things. I'm talking about the notion of rationality arising from cognitive science, not Hollywood. Rationality is the art of making decisions that are ever more effective at moving your life and the world toward your values. Note that if moving the world toward your values requires actually interacting with the world, it usually helps to have accurate beliefs about the world. When your map doesn't match the territory, it's a lot harder to get where you're trying to go. 

Rationality activism means working collaboratively at the grass-roots level to make ourselves, each other, and the world more rational.

Religion is not responsible for all of human irrationality. It preys on and exacerbates what irrationality already exists. With or without religion, we are predictably irrational. We make certain kinds of mistakes over and over again, simply because our brains must cut a lot of corners to navigate our fast-paced, complex environment. If everyone was expected, and given the tools, to patch these bugs in their cognitive programming, religion wouldn't stand a chance in the first place.

In a post to lesswrong.com, Eliezer Yudkowsky proposes a thought experiment along the following lines. Imagine you have the opportunity to teach everybody one general method of rationality that is directed at making people more effective human beings, and it can't target religion in particular. What might you do to raise the sanity waterline high enough that religion goes under?

Well, maybe there is no one particular method that could make that happen. But we are, at the very least, narrowing in on a group of habits of thought that make people better at thinking critically, testing hypotheses, and avoiding—or at least mitigating the damage caused by—the cognitive biases we were all born with. The world where everyone consistently practices these kinds of habits is the one I'm really after. The fact that it probably doesn't include religion is merely an added bonus.

So hey, we don't have to funnel all our passion, frustration, and other forces driving us to get out there and change the world for the better into banging on church doors hoping for deconversions. Neither do we have to settle for leveling the playing field so atheists are treated just as well--and just as poorly--as theists. We don't have to fight against religion, thereby letting it set the terms of our activism.

Instead, we can work together to fight for rationality.

Mobius Chess

Many thanks to Robby Bensinger and Jesse Galef for the feedback loops of brilliant geekery without which this might not have happened.

I think actual game play would work best with felt and velcro.

Step one: three and a half pieces of paper. Fold.

Step two: color. And color. And color. Oh god so much coloring. Black should be opposite black.

Step three: mobify.

To be honest, my original motivation was my feeling that pawn promotion is a bit of a copout. This seemed the most interesting way to do away with it.

Final product:

P.S. This is basically what I'm envisioning for the diagonally looping bishop variant. Just imagine eight columns with the usual two color pattern.

Marriage Equality: You're Doing It Wrong

Guess what. I don't support gay marriage! Didn't expect that, did you?

Chill, this has nothing to do with hating gay people. I’m not straight myself. In fact, let's take a moment to mourn the death of sanity all of this Prop 8 nonsense proclaims. Ok, moving on.

Marriage itself is unconstitutional.

Before I argue for disestablishment, let's be clear that we're talking about civil marriage here, the mode of existence marriage takes in law. Most of the arguments for marriage the Right exudes pertain to either religious marriage or a fanciful idealization of historical marriage. Arguments from sanctity and tradition are plainly irrelevant to the governmental establishment of civil marriage, so I won't subject you to serious consideration of them. Arguments from the Left are a bit more diverse, but nearly all of them fall into the broad categories delineated univocally by the Right. By and large they are sanctity arguments presented sentimentally instead of religiously.

The only common argument for civil marriage worthy of refutation is the argument from reproduction. It goes like this. Government should be able to regulate marital relationships because the production of children is necessary for the continuation of the country. As Charles Cooper put it in his oral argument to the California Supreme Court, 

There is clearly a rational basis justifying the traditional definition of marriage. The key reason that marriage has existed at all in any society and at any time is that sexual relationships between men and women naturally produce children. Society has no particular interest in a platonic relationship between a man and a woman no matter how close, no matter how committed it may be.

But civil marriage is not about children and hasn’t been since 1964. Before that year, it was illegal in Connecticut for doctors to provide council to couples asking about contraception. Estelle Griswold, then director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, was convicted of violating this law when she and the League’s medical director were caught advising couples on methods of birth control. She appealed, and in the end the law was struck down by the US Supreme Court, ruling that it violated the right to privacy implicit in the Bill of Rights.

The case’s direct effect was to grant married couples the right to use contraceptives; but other results were far more profound. Griswold v Connecticut impacted marriage law in two giant ways. It first established that the first, third, fourth, and ninth amendments together create a right to privacy within marriage. Additionally, in protecting under that right the freedom to employ contraception, all legally recognized sexual relationships thereafter no longer existed in law for the purpose of bearing children, as the sexually active couple was free to choose indefinitely to not conceive. By legalizing contraception for married couples the case divorced civil marriage from the conception of children. Whatever the purpose of civil marriage, it is not that proposed by Carles Cooper and his compatriots.

So much for positive grounds for civil marriage. Onward to my own claim.

Civil marriage is not only groundless but positively unconstitutional. Specifically, it violates the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause with respect to the class of unmarried individuals. There is precedent supporting its lack of a rational basis, but I claim further that it fails every other step of the equal protection test as well.

Shortly after the Griswald case, a similar scene went down in Massachusetts. In 1971, pro-choice activist William Baird gave a lecture at Boston University on birth control and overpopulation. After the lecture he gave a spermicidal foam to a woman in the audience. In Massachusetts, contraceptives could be distributed legally only by registered medical professionals, and then only to married couples. As neither condition was met in this case, the state charged Baird with a felony. The defense argued that the Massachusetts law violated the right to privacy noted in the Griswold case seven years earlier.

In the end, the law was overthrown, but not because of the right to privacy. The pertinent question was re-framed like this: Rather than asking whether the right to privacy applied to the sex lives of singles as well, the court asked whether there ever were grounds for differentiating between married and unmarried people in the first place.

To understand the court’s ruling and its broader significance, you have to know about the interpretation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment employed in law. See, the actual wording of the amendment is,

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

But the broadest interpretation of the text would make most legislation impossible. If this actually meant that every law must apply to all citizens equally, there could not be, for instance, distinctions in legislation between eight-year-olds and fifty-year-olds, nor between billionaires and the poor. To prevent this stalemate, whenever a question arises regarding the validity of distinctions between groups, the group getting shafted undergoes an “equal protection test”.

Here's how the test works.

1. First we ask, “Is the characteristic defining the group immutable?” Skin color and gender, for instance, are immutable. Choice of vehicle is not. Obviously, not all defining characteristics are so unequivocal.
2. If the answer to the first question is yes, the distinction is subject to “strict scrutiny” which means asking, “Is there a compelling argument that the state has a legitimate interest in protecting one group and not the other?” If the answer to that is yes as well, then the law in question can be upheld. Otherwise it’s unconstitutional.
3. If the answer to the first question is “no”, then the second question becomes, “Does the group under review have a history of maltreatment?” If yes, the state may have an ulterior motive for legislating against them, which again triggers strict scrutiny.
4. If there is no immutable characteristic and no history of maltreatment, we move on to the question of whether or not a fundamental interest is at stake. Fundamental interests are a purposefully hazy class of which the most famous are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If an interest the court deems fundamental is at stake, strict scrutiny is triggered.
5. If not, the law can be upheld as long as there is some “rational basis” for the distinction. The rational basis test is a very easy one to pass, because any reasonable ground whatsoever applies. Very few cases involve distinctions that failed rational basis.

Eisenstaedt v. Baird is one of those few. Though the defense’s initial criticism of the Massachusetts law concerned an extension of the right to privacy, the case moved into equal protection law when singles were identified as an insular group against which the state legislated. An equal protection test was clearly in order.

Is it constitutional to uphold a law granting rights to married people that singles are denied?

In this case, singles made it all the way through the first three sections; according to the judges, the group was not defined by an immutable characteristic, did not have a history of maltreatment, and there were no fundamental interests at stake. Ultimately, though, there was simply no legitimate interest for the state, no “rational basis”, that warranted distinguishing between married and single people in awarding the right to use contraceptives.

The implications of that ruling are potentially much, much more extensive than anyone seems to realize. As far as I can tell, non-married people have delighted in their equal right to use contraceptives and have left it at that; efforts toward "marriage equality" remain overwhelmingly focused on extending marital benefits to same-sex couples, while attempts to secure further equality for single citizens barely exist. Though married people enjoy 1,049 federal rights and benefits denied to the unmarried, singles seem oblivious to their own marginalization.

Assuming, keeping with the Eisenstadt ruling, that the unmarried don’t warrant strict scrutiny, the tedious enterprise of examining every marital right and benefit for a rational basis may appear excessive. When running singles through the full equal protection test, however, I obtain very different results from those judged in 1971. If it happens that upon further consideration the unmarried fail every single step of the equal protection test, the process of awarding them far-reaching equality may be streamlined.

Conveniently, that’s exactly the case.

Let’s take it from the top: the first step is immutability. Is the class of unmarried people defined by an immutable characteristic? At first glance it doesn't look like it. After all, marriage is something you can opt into or out of. No one has to stay single, right? (Note: I’ve actually heard people argue that, “Even gay men can marry women.”)

It’s actually not quite that simple. It helps to keep in mind that the defining characteristic in question is that of the unmarried. The status of “married” certainly isn’t immutable, as anyone can say “no” to a proposal, and anyone can get a divorce. But “unmarried” is a default state that was never initially chosen by anyone, and it’s simply not true that every adult is totally free to opt out of the unmarried status. First of all, it isn’t something that can be done alone; unlike choosing a car or a career, it requires an equal commitment by another person. While individuals have full freedom regarding their own decision to remain in or resign from the single class, they have no direct reign over the decisions of potential marriage partners. Since “unmarried” is the default state, an individual can not actually choose freely to exit the class into which she was born, making it an immutable characteristic.

Secondly, there are plenty of clear barriers indefinitely preventing some people from getting married. Some who desire marriage simply fail to find a partner, and others may not have access to marriage due to physical or mental illness. That alone is enough to trigger strict scrutiny (as opposed to the rational basis test, or “ordinary scrutiny”, applied in Eisenstadt v. Baird). But there’s more.

The second question is, “Does the group have a history of maltreatment?” The Supreme Court of 1971 must have experienced a temporary lapse in most cognitive faculties to have answered “no” to this question. The correct answer is unassailably “yes”, and especially for the subclass of unmarried women. Until fairly recently it was nearly impossible for an unmarried woman to support herself, because the entire structure of society was built around the bias toward patriarchal marriage. An adult woman without a husband underwent severe economic and social maltreatment, all the worse if she bore children. The economic maltreatment in particular continues today, largely as a result of the rights denied to the unmarried.

In summary thus far: the defining characteristic of the class in question is immutable and there is a clear history of maltreatment. Is there also a fundamental interest at stake? Does legislation against singles encroach upon some basic, fundamental human right?

Yes, it does. In the past, identifications of fundamental interests in Supreme Court cases have included the right to parent. There are many ways in which legislation against the unmarried encumbers parenting. Robin West enumerates:

All unmarried parents… both the truly single, and those in committed, but unmarried relationships, will find their parenting burdened by marriage laws, and by the scores of financial benefits withheld them by virtue of that status. Unmarried poor parents will not have a deceased marital partner’s Social Security or military pension on which to draw—nor will she have the possibility of drawing on that of a deceased companion, coparent, or intimate. She will not have the benefit of favorable tax treatment, or private health insurance provided to spouses, that are routinely accorded married persons. She will not have a partner with a virtual “power of attorney” to make decisions on her behalf or that of her children, should she become incapacitated. Either directly or indirectly, the law is deeply implicated in a regime that has an adverse impact upon a class of people trying to engage in a basic, fundamental life activity—bearing, nurturing, and raising children—and trying to do so outside the protective perimeters of marriage.

Obviously, government intervention or no, single parents face challenges to which couples are not subject. It is the fundamental right of an individual to confront those challenges and raise her children, with or without a co-parent. The problem is not that single parents have a tougher time overall. It’s that a prodigious portion of that hardship is caused by the denial of marital benefits to unmarried parents. Surely, if parents are receiving federal aid in caring for their children, single parents need it most. But that’s not the world we’re living in. Not yet.

Finally, does the state have any interest whatsoever in denying rights to single people it affords to married couples? Remember Griswald vs Connecticut. The many arguments founded on the state’s interest in procreation are void. Arguments for the stability life-long partnerships create in society are flimsy as well; no-fault divorce means a marriage can end at any time. There is no longer any legal obligation to remain married, and a third of US marriages last less than ten years.

The most legitimate interest the state might have in the institution of civil marriage is the care members of a marriage provide for each other. Whenever one individual supports another in a time of need, she removes that responsibility from the state. Ideally, married couples engage in this kind of support consistently, and they’re rewarded copiously for it through their many rights and benefits. It makes sense for the government to actively encourage and fortify such care-giving behavior.

But the exclusive identification of marriage with relationships of care-giving is transparently mistaken. Humans are social creatures, so when something goes wrong we look to the networks of support in which we find ourselves. Those networks are invaluable not only to individuals but to the state, and they are far more diverse than the traditional husband/wife family model. The enterprise of care-giving can take innumerable forms: a lesbian couple raising a child, a middle-aged man caring for his elderly mother, a woman and her male best friend together raising children from previous marriages, or a man supporting his chronically ill brother, to name a small handful.

Take another look at the words of Charles Cooper.

The key reason that marriage has existed at all in any society and at any time is that sexual relationships between men and women naturally produce children. Society has no particular interest in a platonic relationship between a man and a woman no matter how close, no matter how committed it may be.

The truth is, society has no legitimate interest in the private sexual lives of citizens, but it has every interest in close and committed relationships whether or not they be of a sexual nature as well. By indiscriminately distributing financial support to married couples who may not require it solely by virtue of their presumably sexual partnership, less funding remains for singles in selfless, draining, committed care-giving positions. There is no rational basis for providing financial benefits and other civil rights to married people while denying them to the unmarried.

The legal distinction between marital statuses fails the equal protection test many times over, serves no state interest, and harms society as a whole. Yes, it is horrible that, in the US, gay people can’t marry each other while straight people can. But if we’re serious about equality for all, we should be dissolving civil marriage. Not expanding it.

Werewolf

I recently discovered a party game called Werewolf. I'm utterly captivated by it. I understand that there are several variations, but I'll just explain the most basic and the two that I've played.

The basic narrative is this. You're in a medieval village, and there's a werewolf on the loose. The werewolf is killing people at night while the town sleeps. A sort of witch-hunt ensues, the villagers decide one among them is the wolf, and that person is lynched. But if they've chosen incorrectly, someone gets killed the following night, and another person is lynched the next day.

In the variations I played, the town also has a doctor, and a visiting professional werewolf hunter. The doctor knows how to make a special anti-werewolf potion, and he can make exactly one dose a day to protect a villager through the night. The hunter has a magic pendant that glows in the presence of a werewolf, but it can only be used on one person a night and must re-charge during the day.

1. Everyone gets a card. One card signifies "narrator", one "werewolf", and the rest "villagers". The narrator reveals himself, but the other players keep their cards secret.
2. The narrator says, "Goodnight villagers," and the other players close their eyes, beginning the night phase of the game. They all begin to tap their legs, making noise so no one can identify who is taking non-verbal actions by sound. The narrator says, "Werewolf, wake up." The werewolf opens her eyes. The doctor asks her who she wants to kill, and she points at a player who isn't the narrator. The narrator takes note and tells the werewolf to go back to sleep. The narrator then says, "Good morning villagers," and all players open their eyes, beginning the day phase.
3. During the day phase, the non-narrator players must vote on who they think the wolf is. The person with the most votes gets lynched--that is, she leaves the game and reveals her card. (Presumably they go through her belongings after the lynching and discover her true identity.) If she was indeed the werewolf, the villagers have won. If she wasn't, the game returns to the night phase. The goal of the villagers is to save as many villagers as possible, and the goal of the wolf is to kill as many as possible without getting lynched.

Now, during the day phase, the wolf does what he can to convince the villagers that he's not the wolf. Obviously, no one wants anyone else to think she's the wolf, innocent or not. In this most basic case, it's almost entirely a game of social dynamics, where you're either trying to lie convincingly or trying to find the liar. This can be fun, but it gets so much better.

Here's the first variation I played.

1. Start with five people and five cards. The cards can be from a poker deck or something else, provided one card signifies "werewolf", one "doctor", one "hunter", one "villager", and one "narrator". Each player looks at her card and keeps it secret, with the exception of the narrator, who reveals herself as such.
2. Upon the narrator's instruction, the other four players close their eyes. They all begin to tap their legs, making noise so no one can identify who is taking non-verbal actions by sound. The narrator says, "Doctor, wake up." The player with the doctor card opens her eyes. The narrator asks her, "Who do you want to protect?" The doctor points to a player who is not the narrator, and the narrator takes note of this. The narrator says, "Doctor, go back to sleep," and the doctor closes her eyes. The narrator says, "Werewolf, wake up." The werewolf opens her eyes. The doctor asks her who she wants to kill, and she points at a player who isn't the narrator. The narrator takes note and tells the werewolf to go back to sleep. The narrator has the hunter wake up, asks who she thinks the werewolf is, takes note, and has her go back to sleep. Then the narrator says, "Good morning villagers!" and everyone opens their eyes (and stops tapping).
3. If the doctor protected the same person the werewolf tried to kill, and the hunter failed to discover the werewolf, the narrator says, "No one died." If the doctor protected a different person than the werewolf tried to kill, the narrator says, "[Name of player] died." If the hunter discovered the werewolf, the village kills the werewolf and villagers still alive win. If the hunter failed to discover the werewolf and a non-werewolf character died, the dead player reveals her card to the other players. (Perhaps the villagers notice she's not at town council, go investigate at her house, discover she's dead, and learn her true identity by examining her belongings.)
4. The remaining villagers must now vote. By majority vote, they can either wait another night (and risk losing someone to the wolf), or lynch the person they vote is the wolf. If they lynch the wrong person, that person does not reveal her card (perhaps the lynchings take place in the evening and everyone goes directly to bed afterward), and the game returns to night phase.

Now this gets really interesting really quickly. For the moment, I'll leave you to think about why, and I'll describe some interesting scenarios in the near future.

I like this variation even more: everything is as above, but if there are n players, use (n+2)-4 villager cards. 2 cards are discarded, and no one knows what they are. This means there's probably a werewolf, but only the narrator (and the wolf, if there is one) is completely certain. This might be a true witch hunt. Similarly, there might be a doctor, and there might be a hunter, but it's not a guarantee. Did no one die last night because the doctor protected the right person, or because there's no wolf? Is the person claiming to be the hunter really the hunter, or has the wolf figured out that there isn't a hunter so he can safely pretend to hunt? Maybe if we're confident there's no wolf, we should lynch no one and have the doctor protect herself tonight to be certain. But this can't be a perfect test, because if the wolf is sly she'll target the doctor to produce a false negative. Not to mention, perhaps there's no doctor at all!

My Christmas Tree